


Kings of Nowhere

by EudociaCovert



Series: The Best Path [5]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Agressive Friend Making, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Chapter five is a huge metaphor for Jet's crazy brain, Child Soldiers, Dark, Darkness, Desperation, Disturbing Content, Dubious Morality, Freedom Fighters, Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Jet is kinda possessive, Jet is terrifying, Jet's crazy for actual reasons, Jet's life is crap, Longshot sees all things, Murder, No one wants to live in Jet's head, People don't understand Zuko, Reference to Child Deaths, Refugees, Sensory Deprivation, Smellerbee kicks all the asses, Theivery, Zuko doesn't understand people, Zuko is a stubborn man lost in a stubborn land, Zuko is protective, Zuko is the cat lady of guilt, graphic depictions of sandstorms, graphic descriptions of death, mostly because he's terrified
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-01
Updated: 2017-01-19
Packaged: 2018-04-02 08:11:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 29,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4052863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EudociaCovert/pseuds/EudociaCovert
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Calamity strikes. Jet falls into dark habits, and Zuko tries to put himself back together. Part 5 of 'The Best Path' series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Sandstorms

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something goes wrong during a sandstorm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: This is the fic where things start getting pretty dark, on the very top end of the 'T' rating. There's some disturbing content in this chapter dealing with Jet's rather skewed morals and the realities of his childhood as a child soldier; if you think this might bother you, please skip to the end notes before you read each chapter for spoilers to these disturbing scenes.

Other than the painfully slow task of earning Blue’s trust, there’s not a lot to do in the caravan. There have been problems with the food and water supply, a few thieves reported, and a couple deaths due to heat, injury, or sickness, but for the most part their journey into the desert has been problem free. It makes Jet feel uneasy.

Things don’t go this well for long, in his experience.

Smellerbee seems to be just as edgy, and Longshot is getting… well, not antsy, but tightly cautious. Longshot’s been a little off for a good week; something is bugging him and Jet hasn’t had the opportunity to handle it. There is a certain way to approach Longshot, and in the presence of strangers is definitely not it. Blue’s pretty tightly wound himself, although Jet’s pretty sure that is for different reasons. Blue seems to be some kind of tragedy sponge, observing every atrocity, every pain, every injustice within the ranks of the refugees, and cradling it within himself. Where Jet listens to the sad stories of others its to remind himself why he fights, Blue just… holds them. Feels them.

Jet wonders if Blue is such a loner because he can’t quit caring. If Jet couldn’t stop hurting for every person he met he wouldn’t want to meet many people either.

“What is that?” a girl asks, and Jet turns his head in the direction she is pointing. There’s a dark haze on the horizon, deluding the blue of the sky. Smoke is Jet’s first instinct, but the haze is too spread out, with no telltale glow beneath it. There’s nothing to burn out here anyways.

“Sandstorm,” someone murmurs, and the word passes person to person through the gathered people, quiet and unnerved, like a chill. Jet whistles a warning to the others, keeping his eyes on the horizon and the grin off of his face for the sake of the refugees around him. He’s not happy about the coming danger, but he's grimly satisfied to have something to fight. Jet always feels more alive when he has something to fight.

\---

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Smellerbee says, staring at the incoming storm. It’s grown at an alarming rate for something so far away, having nearly doubled its size since it was first spotted. It only covers a sixth of the sky, but it's still massive, and the sunlight is already losing its brightness due to the dust in the air.

“Me neither,” Jet says. “We’ll have to stop and tie everything down before it gets here, make sure all the kids are rounded up. It’d be way too easy to lose someone in something like that.”

Blue nods grimly. “We’d never find them.”

“Right. We might as well do that now. Just make sure the parents understand what’s going on and have their kids handy, and that the orphans have a place to stay.” Smellerbee and Longshot dart off, Blue only waiting to nod again at Jet before he follows.

It feels good to give an order and have it followed. It feels like control, like protection, like trust. It’s an illusion, of course; although she’s loosened up a little, Smellerbee still watches him like he could lose his mind at any moment, Longshot’s usual calm is touched with the signs of a problem he isn’t coming to Jet about, and Blue hasn’t even given him a NAME yet. Still, it’s better than those first weeks after their forest burned, when anything Jet said was taken like the ravings of a madman. Anything is better than that. He’s doing better. He's gaining their trust, little by little.

All of them.

Most of the parents already have their children in hand, reacting to the foreboding atmosphere caused by the hushed caravan and the darkening sky, but Jet does happen upon a panicked father looking for his young son. By the time Jet finds the kid, who hid himself in the back of the last wagon in the caravan with the instinctual reaction to danger that kills as many kids as it saves, the sky is thick and dark, and the storm nearly upon them.

There is no time to regroup, so Jet whistles ‘find shelter’ into the growing wind, a warbling sound made between his palms. It feels thin in the air, like the wind and sand will destroy it before it can reach its target, but it’s the best he can do. The sand is stinging against his skin, surprisingly painful, by the time he finds himself a spot amongst the people huddled around one of the wagons. Jet's lungs feel heavy and itch. He pulls his shirt up against his mouth to filter out the dust and breaths in, coughing in alarm when a familiar scent invades his nose and hits the back of his throat. His shirt still smells like smoke. He grits his teeth, wishing strongly for something he could chew to get the sudden taste of ash out of his mouth, but his last stalk of grass lost its taste days ago, so he fists his hands and bears it.

The wind really hits them with the sound of roaring, loud and vicious against Jet’s ears. Jet remembers it from his fight with the Avatar, the rushing almost like the crash of a wave, but hostile in how it is accompanied by the physical force of the air buffeting his body. It isn’t a sensation he’d wanted to relive.

Jet turns his head, finding that while the noise subsides when his ear is turned directly to the wind, the unpredictable direction of the gusts and the sting of sand against the side of his face is too much to make it worth it. He finally has to tuck his head into his knees and clasps his hands over his neck for protection. The sand hits the metal of his shoulder guards in uneven tinny rhythms, and the wind tugs at his clothes like grasping hands. He can feel the pressure against his back, a slapping press of force that almost feels like an attack.

Longshot’s hat is going to fly away, Jet thinks inanely.

Someone shouts in alarm, and Jet looks up to see the wagon tilted towards them precariously. Several people scramble out of the way, but most leap up with Jet to push against the wooden side and right the leaning wagon. It’s alarming, as they have to push until the wheels are completely on the ground before the pressure lets up, gravity’s aide greatly hindered within the influence of the sandstorm. Jet tries to count the refugees when they come shuffling back to the wagon, but it’s impossible to tell if everyone made it back.

There’s no way they’re getting through this without losing someone, Jet thinks grimly.

\--

Jet whistles into the clearing air, marveling at the sunlight filtering through the thinning dust. He had no idea how dark it had gotten until the wind began to calm, the oppressive press of air and sand slowly stilling. The reemergence of the sun gives him a curious feeling of beginning, like a small dawn to a short day.

There’s an answering whistle, and the tightness in Jet’s chest eases. He may have every faith in his Freedom Fighter’s abilities, but it’s always hard not to worry when they're out of his line of sight.

There’s no echo to the welcome sound, so the others must be together. Jet scans the shifted desert landscape. People are shuffling out of hiding places, shaking dirt from their clothes and surveying the damage. The wagon he was huddled beside is half buried in a sand drift, and some of the more abled bodied refugees have begun organizing themselves to dig it out. Overall, Jet thinks they weathered the storm well. They only have another day alone in the desert before the scouts Lu told them about are supposed to find them, and things are looking good.

Not everyone faired so well, of course. As Jet walks through the clusters of people he hears the frantic calling of names, the desperate cries to stop, turn the caravan around, send out a search party, anything. It won’t happen, he knows. Supplies are dangerously low, and the people already slow and desperate due to days in the hot killing sun. They won’t risk themselves for the few too stupid to find shelter in time. No one here has gotten this far by being a bleeding heart.

Except for Blue, maybe. Jet’s still trying to figure that one out.

He spots Longshot leaning against the third wagon and waves, knowing the archer has already spotted him. Longshot dips his head in greeting. It looks like he miraculously kept hold of his hat, although it does seem a bit more battered than it had been. His clothes are also uncharacteristically askew, coated liberally with dust, which washes out the colors. He still fared better than Jet, who’s already scruffy hair has become a tangled mess beyond mortal help.

“Looks like you guys did alright,” Jet grins. “I almost got pinned by a tipped wagon.” Longshot frowns, tapping one finger against the outside of his thigh, and Jet’s heart freezes.

Longshot is alone.

Jet whistles again, cupping his hands around his mouth to amplify the noise.

There’s no answer.

  
He tries again.

Nothing.

Smellerbee isn’t answering, and neither is Blue.

It takes him a moment to process it. Unless Jet seriously overestimated him, Blue is a survivor tough enough to hold his own, and Jet stopped underestimating Smellerbee when she was ten. Neither of them would have wandered off during the storm. Neither of them would have taken a single chance they didn’t have to.To lose one of them could be a freak twist of fate, but both? It doesn't make sense.

Longshot steps even with him, thrumming with tension. He scans the horizon, then scans it again, his tightening shoulders telling Jet everything he needs to know.

Blue is gone. _Smellerbee_ is gone.

“We’ll find them," he vows, and spits the taste of smoke out of his mouth.

\---

They comb the caravan, starting at the back and moving forward. People answer their questions, or turn away to protect themselves from confronting Jet’s growing panic, or just sit and cry, lost in their own pain.

Jet never remembers what this pain is like until its back again. He always thinks he does, but it becomes dulled with time, in both emotion and memory. He’s always surprised by how sharp it is, how aware of the world he becomes, how physical the grief is, when he’s just lost someone.

No.

He hasn’t lost them. He won’t admit it until there’s a body in front of his feet.

They’re fine. They have to be.

When Jet spots Chao-Xing and her kid his heart lifts, sure Blue will be close to his favorite refugees, only to plummet when he nears he doesn’t spot the distinctive boy anywhere.

"Have you seen Blue?” Jet calls to her, still scanning the area around him.

The woman looks up, her pleasant face slipping into worry. “Not since before the storm,” she answers. “He made sure we were as safe as he could make us, and then kept going. You can’t find him?”

“I’m sure he’s fine,” Jet tells her, even though he’s pretty sure he’s not. Min is watching with wide eyes, terrified of a pain he knows she recognizes, and he doesn’t want to hurt her.

He salutes the young girl with two fingers, making her smile, and holds a smirk on his face like a shield until he’s facing away. He lets it drop, staring into Longshot’s dark eyes and feeling like his chest has been shredded. “I’m sure they’ll be fine,” he says, half to himself and half to assure Longshot. The archer doesn’t buy it; he’s known Jet for far too long to fall for his comfort, but he nods a little anyways. Because he does know Jet, and Jet needs people to believe him.

If he can’t get people to believe him, he can’t believe himself. And if Jet stops believing he’ll stop fighting, and if he stops fighting he’ll die.

It’s as simple as that.

\--

When they find out that the fourth wagon is missing warning bells start chiming in Jet’s head. To lose a few people is one thing, but to lose an entire wagon?

“There’s nothing we can do about it,” the man he’s talking to sighs. “Without the supplies in that wagon we’re even less prepared to search out the lost than we were before.”

“We can’t leave them out there to starve!” A woman yells, and Jet nods in agreement, even though he would have agreed with the man if Smellerbee and Blue weren’t out there. It’s always different, when the victims are his.

“It’s impossible," the man says.

“It’s convenient,” Jet counters darkly.

The man narrows his eyes at him. “What are you suggesting?”

Jet doesn’t answer, just shaking his head. He doesn’t have a theory really, just enough experience with how shitty life can be to know there’s something off about this.

\--

They comb the caravan twice before Jet gives up the hope that they simply overlooked the two missing kids. As soon as he realizes they really are gone, he shuts down the fear and the panic, and THINKS.

“We’ll need supplies,” he murmurs. There isn’t much left to take, but he bets a few of the refugees have some food and water hoarded out of sight. They’ll have to wait until it starts getting dark and gather up whatever’s useful. He chafes at the thought of waiting until nightfall to begin their search, but all leaving now would do is kill him and Longshot along with the others.

No. He can’t think about that.

He eyes the camelephants pulling the remaining wagons, but dismisses them. They’ve already been pushed to their breaking points, and he’d need a lot more people than just him and Longshot to appropriate one of them without being seen. And Jet doesn’t want to be seen; there’s something wrong about this situation, and he isn’t trusting anyone that isn't his until he knows exactly what.

“We’ll have to move out on foot,” he mutters unhappily. Longshot straightens beside him, and Jet follows his line of sight, spotting something approaching the caravan moments before a jubilant cry rings through the remaining refugees.

The scouts have arrived with fresh supplies, to guide them out of this blasted desert.

And they came with ostrich-horses.

Jet grins.

\---

The sky is bleeding into night when Jet ties the last of their stolen supplies to the back of the ostrich horse Longshot is seated on. As he’s securing the last knot his friend twitches to warn him, and Jet placed his hand on the grip of the hook sword hanging at his hip and casts a glance over his shoulder to find a woman and child watching from the growing shadows.

“He’s gone, and you’re going after him,” Chao-Xing states.

Jet shrugs, not denying it. “Smellerbee’s gone too.”

Chao-Xing frowns. “Neither of those children would appreciate you following them into certain death.”

“I’ve lived through too much shit to believe in ‘certain’ anything.”

“It’s insanity.”

Jet chuckles darkly. “Yeah well, I've been told I'm a bit crazy.” He turns to her and lets his face soften. “I won’t leave them out there to die.”

She looks at him with wet mother’s eyes. “Then I wish you the best of luck. Find us, when you reach Ba Sing Se," she offers. "We'll have tea together.”

“We will,” he nods, and then after a moment’s thought copies the bow he’s seen Blue give her, as best he can. “Take care of yourself. He likes you.”

“Likewise,” she smiles warmly, and turns towards back into the moving caravan, her little girl wide eyed and scared at her side. Jet watches her for a moment before swinging onto the ostrich-horse's back behind Longshot.

“Let’s go,” he says, and Longshot dips his head in agreement, and urges the beast forward.

Jet knows she's right, that there's no way this will end well, but there's nothing else to do.

The thing about Jet is this: He doesn’t let go.

\--

The next morning is breaking when they catch their first glimpse of something other than sand. Jet is staring straight ahead, tired and fighting the fears in his head, when Longshot turns their mount to the left and urges it into a trot, bringing them closer to a black smudge on the canvas of tan.

It’s a young man, Jet realizes as they near him. He’s laying prone, making a wet click when he breathes, his chest caved in alarmingly and his legs twisted sickeningly. There’s blood on his mouth and wild fear in his eyes, and he begins to cry the moment he sees Jet and Longshot.

Jet dismounts, surveying the scene for a moment before he sinks to his knees beside the dying man. “Shh,” he sooths, running one careful hand down the man’s arm and gripping his cold hand, and cupping the back of his neck with the other.

“I can’t feel my legs,” The man whispers, and Jet feels sick.

“Tell me what happened,” he says, rubbing his thumb over the back of the man’s hand comfortingly, “and I’ll help you.”

“There were people inside the sand,” the man says, his voice thin and panicked.

“Did you see a boy with a sword and a scar and a kid with a headband and marks on their face?” Jet asks urgently. The man makes a sound of distress, and Jet loosens his tight grip on his hand. “I’m sorry.”

“They, they weren’t…” The man coughs, and Jet feels hot flecks of blood hit his face. “Not our people. Someone else.”

“What do you mean?” Jet breathes, suddenly very aware, and very angry.

“Earthbenders,” the man whispers. “There were people inside the sand.”

“They did this?” Jet asks, looking down at the broken refugee’s twisted body.

"I tried to run,” the man says, and begins to cry again.

“Hey, hey,” Jet whispers. He rubs his hand over the dying refugee's sweat covered forehead. “Don’t cry. It’s going to be alright.” He waits until the tears stop, rubbing his hand up and down the man’s arm, gripping the hair at the scruff of his neck comfortingly. “Which direction did they go?”

The man lifts a shaking finger and points past his feet. “There.” He shifts his hand to grab at Jet’s wrist with the surprising intensity of someone near death. “Help me.” He pleads.

“Okay.” Jet says. He meets Longshots eyes, the only mercy he’s capable of giving naked on his face. Longshot gives a long pained look, and turns away. Jet looks back at the dying man and steels himself.

“Relax,” Jet says, removing his fingers from their grip on the back of the man’s neck and rubbing his hand over the man’s forehead one last time. Then he clasps his palm over the man’s mouth and nose and holds on. The man jerks, his eyes shooting open and his broken chest bucking. He scrambles at Jet’s hand with his own, but the Freedom Fighter has no trouble taking his wrists in his free hand and holding them to the sand in the gentlest position he can manage. The man makes a low noise of alarm, but Jet knows how cruel it would be to listen to it, so he shuts his ears and does what must be done. He can feel warm blood and spit against his palm, the graze of teeth as the man fights.

“It’s okay, let go,” Jet says with as much kindness as he can manage. “Don’t struggle and it won’t hurt for much longer. You did well, kid. You did just fine, you can let go now.” It takes so long, moments of long silence broken by desperate fighting, growing weaker and weaker. It always takes so long. Jet doesn’t look away. He won’t disrespect the man by looking away.

“We’ll get them for you,” he promises, his oldest and dearest lie. He’s said it before, so many times. It’s gained him smiles, and spit, and pity, and he’s taken them all, because this is the last gift he knows how to give, and the kid on the ground can take it however they want. They’ve earned that.

The man looks at him through bloodshot eyes, accusation in his gaze, as he slowly stills. Jet keeps his hand where it is a few minutes after the man’s face goes slack and his hand falls limply away, to be sure, before letting go and carefully brushing the corpses eyelids shut. He sits back on his heels feeling raw and burnt and so very old.

He gets up, walks a respectful distance away, and vomits until he can believe the water leaking from his eyes is because of the retching.

Breathe in, breathe out, push it down, in, drown it in rage and twist it into fighting spirit.

Get up.

Move on.

“Let’s go,” Jet says as he rejoins Longshot, his voice strong and hard and his head tilted up. Longshot brushes his shoulder against Jet’s as they walk back to the ostrich-horse, and Jet takes the comfort and wraps the little kid crying in his head with it.

“We’ll find them,” Jet promises Longshot in return, and prays that this lie, like his last one, will be one he can twist into a truth.

Smellerbee will be fine. Blue too.

And if they aren’t… Well.

Now he knows there’s someone he can make pay for it. And they will.

Every last one of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Graphic depictions of a mercy kill.


	2. Bonds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Smellerbee and Zuko, fighting and forging bonds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This. Took. So. Long to write. Zuko kept trying to wallow and Smellerbee wanted to kick everyone's butt, and everyone was slinging their feelings everywhere and no one would behave. I seriously have like, 6 heart to hearts between these two that didn't make it in, it's insane. Sorry about the wait. On the up side, it's a good 5000 words long!
> 
> warnings in end notes.

He doesn't know it's a fight, at first. Zuko would have had a chance, if he had.

He wasn’t expecting trouble during the sandstorm, or MORE trouble, focused on keeping his clothing from smacking loudly against his skin and the sand out of his eyes. Despite this, Zuko's always ready for danger on some level. If he had seen some sign, some clue that not all was well, he would have been ready and he could have had a chance.

Instead he only has the briefest instant between when something clamps down on his leg and when he’s skipping over the sand like a stone over a lake to act, and he can't. He's dragged, fast and hard, and instinctual kicking and bucking do no good against the sand wrapped around his ankle like a vice. When he's dropped he rolls onto his feet and swings around, reaching to draw his Dao in case the bender, because someone who could jerk him away from the caravan in such a way has to be a bender, comes close enough to hit. Instead the sand wraps around his sheath and hilts and yanks his weapon from his grasp, sending them careening out into the sandstorm, to be buried by the raging earth and forgotten.

Zuko cries out at the loss and spins, trying to spot the bender within the storm. The sand bucks beneath him like a living thing, throwing him into the air. He lands in a rough tumble, managing to roll back onto his feet, keeping his movements light and quick. Hopefully his enemy’s vision is as impaired at his is, and he can dance out of range before they spot him.

Did someone find out what he was? Did one of the few Earthbending refugees realize Zuko’s skin and eyes were a bit too light and decide to deal with him in secret, during the storm?

He shakes off his theories and concentrates on fact. Fire is impossible in this environment; even if he could keep a flame going for more than a second in this storm there is no way he could control it, and he has no target. He clenches his teeth and keeps moving, praying that luck will have his back just this once, and he’ll manage to lose the enemy before the storm clears.

A wave of sand slams into his calves, sending him sprawling. He lands badly, not quite able to twist the fall into another roll, and before he can regain his footing sand is shifting over him like a wave. He shouts wordlessly as it locks down around him, twisting into something solid around his hands and feet and torso. The Bender could cover him now, Zuko thinks in alarm, they could bury him like this, like he helped bury the dead man. He could die choking on the sand of this damned desert and no one would ever find him, no one would ever care. Zuko struggles, bucking and twisting and pulling any way he can, scorching the earth and breathing smoke in uncontrolled panic until his breath control leaves him completely and his fire follows.

He closes his eyes and tries to get it back, tries to regain his control, but his breath only becomes thinner, his chest aching with need.  
When he opens his eyes the sand is swirling around him in a tight circle, pulling the air away. He gasps and fights some more, kicking at the sand and twisting his shoulder nearly out of joint trying to free himself, but his head is becoming light and his thoughts disjointed and weak, and he can't fight forever, and eventually he can do nothing but gasp for air that won’t come. He can’t breathe, he can’t, he can’t, he can’t-

He truly believes he is dying, for one terrible moment. He is collapsed on his back, spots in his vision and nothing in his lungs and he feels stark clarity and terrible disappointment that this is the way he will end.

And then he’s choking on air again, breathing in and hacking out dust coated life, his chest burning at the sudden influx of air. He doesn’t have the presence of mind to fight when hands grip his shoulders and lift him to a sitting position, the sand bonds around his hands disintegrating, but when they draw both his arms behind him and begin wrapping something wet around his wrists he reacts, throwing an elbow which crashes into something soft and warm with a crack. He wants to follow up, viciously elated that he’s found something to fight, but sand slams into his chest, pressing him to the ground, and when someone flips him over and ties his hands behind him he isn’t thinking of anything more than getting air into his lungs and keeping it there.

He rolls over and onto his feet when he’s released. The storm thins and Zuko squints at the three shapes it reveals.

One of them has his Dao.

He snarls and tries to stand, but the sand caves under his feet. He struggles fruitlessly for a few moments before he stills, watching the Benders suspiciously.

On of them steps closer, dressed in layers of clothing made to blend in with the sand, cloth wrapped around their face like a mask.  
“Ready to give up, trespasser?”

Zuko bares his teeth but doesn’t say anything, the sucking lack of air still fresh in his mind. With a twist of one of the men’s bodies the sand pushes him to his feet like hands, and knocks against the back of his knees.

“Start moving,” one of the men says.

Zuko starts to walk. He lets his head hang and his posture sag, but his eyes are bright and focused. He isn’t giving up. He never gives up.

But he does know when to wait.

\--

“Good hunting?” someone yells from a ways away, and Zuko’s captors laugh and hoot. The sand whips against Zuko’s legs, urging him faster, and Zuko grits his teeth and hurries his step and doesn’t think of how easy it would be to pull the fire in his belly to his fingertips, knows if he started a fight now he couldn’t follow through. He has no idea how long he’s been walking, but his legs feel heavy, his throat parched, and his feet clumsy in the ever moving sand. The binding around his hands seems to have gotten tighter and stiffer, and the pain in his wrists and arms increasing with each step. He’s fallen twice, to his great shame, and stumbled more times than he can count.

He looks up with effort, to see a line of figures on the horizon. He grits his teeth in displeasure; there’s easily seven figures waving from atop a dune with some rectangular object he can’t make out, a good dozen more milling about in the dip beneath them. It doesn’t matter, he tells himself. Life has taught him this lesson before, hasn’t it? He doesn’t need numbers or strength or skill to win. He just have to want it more.  
Zuko just has to bide his time, and survive.

He will not die a nameless, homeless refugee in a land that isn’t even his.

As he approaches Zuko recognizes the group beneath the dune’s crest as refugees from the caravan, people he’s traveled with. It’s jarring, the realization that he isn’t alone. He wanted to protect these people, and the unexpected sting of that failure and sudden surge of desperate responsibility almost brings him to his knees, but the sand buoys him up and carries him until his step becomes secure. Zuko puts his head down and doesn’t think again until his captors are greeting their fellows with boisterous shouts and he’s immersed in the milling group of refugees. Then he looks up.

There’s about a dozen of them. Some are small but most are taller, all pretty young. All have their hands bound behind their backs. They sit or stand, visibly weary and hopeless, with glassy eyes that stare too far, and he is so relieved not to see little Min's wide eyes or Chao-Xing's tired face. Zuko feels the responsibility squeeze at his lungs like an enemy has him by the throat. Getting himself out of here would be hard, but this many civilians?

“Hey.”

Zuko starts and turns to the voice, his eyes widening when he spots Smellerbee, staring at him from a few steps away. Her face is smudged with dirt and her hair wet with sweat and sticking to her headband and the high points of her face. The red marks on her cheeks are smudged and there are scrapes on her chin. He swallows with a dry itchy throat and doesn't know what to feel about her being in this mess too.

It means Firebending is totally and completely out of the question if he wants to live to see the other side of this damn desert, but there's something about knowing there's someone else who can fight here with him. He knows she can fight by the way she walks, and handles her blades, but there's doubt in his assessment of her, now. She’s just so small, looking tired and young and thin without her armor, her knives, her group.

She steps towards him and Zuko takes a step backwards on instinct and his legs almost give. Startled, he locks his knees to keep himself upright and stops moving. Smellerbee stops moving too, looking him over with narrowed eyes. “Your face is going to bruise. How’s your head feel?”

“Clear enough,” Zuko replies, checking her over in turn. “Injuries?”

Smellerbee shrugs. “A little banged up, but not badly.”

Zuko nods and turns back to scanning the crowd. “Jet and Longshot?”

“Not here,” she says shortly. “At least not yet.”

Zuko eyes her, unsure of how she feels about this. She seemed pretty close to the other two rebels, she should be happy they're away from this, probably out of the desert know, right? “That’s good. Isn't it?”

Smellerbee’s eyes soften a bit, her shoulders loosening. “Yeah,” she replies in a quiet voice. “Means we might still have outside help.”

Zuko blinks. “Help?” he echoes.

Smellerbee’s eyes narrow. “Yeah, help. They won’t expect Jet to come for us.”

She… thinks Jet is going to come for her. Zuko turns it over in his head, confused. Jet cares about his companions, sure, but most of the time he acts like their superior, making calls and giving orders the other two fall in line with. Smellerbee has some say, and Zuko’s sure Longshot does too in his own way, but final calls always seem to fall to Jet. Coming after them would be a foolish move, and Jet, with his calculating eyes and sharp smiles, would know that. Would understand the need for their sacrifice to ensure his own survival.

Zuko doesn’t understand why Smellerbee thinks he’ll risk himself for them.

Smellerbee’s eyes widen slowly and she frowns, stepping closer. “You don’t think he’s coming for us.”

“He might be,” Zuko says hastily, avoiding her eyes. It won’t hurt to let her think Jet’s coming, he tells himself. She needs the hope. “He’s you’re leader. You know him better than me.”

“I do.” Smellerbee says sharply. “He’s coming.”

“Okay,” Zuko says, alarmed at her sudden glower.

Her expression softens a bit but not much, “okay,” she repeats. She nods to herself before gesturing at the ground with her chin. “C’mon, sit,” she… well commands him. “You’re about to keel over.”

Zuko bites back the initial resentment at being ordered around like a child (by a child!) and checks around them one more time, uneasy putting himself in a vulnerable position, despite how hard it is to keep standing. Their captors aren’t paying attention, huddled around the rectangular shape Zuko had spotted earlier. It’s one of the caravan’s wagons, Zuko realizes, and anger swells in his belly, startling him. It shouldn't, none of his possessions are in there, but...

He shuts the line of thought down and moves to sit, hissing as his graceless collapse into a seated position jars his shoulders. Smellerbee walks around so that she’s nearly behind him and Zuko leans away warily, keeping her in his line of sight.

“Calm down,” she snaps when she sees his look. “I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to see about your hands.”

She scans their captors’ ranks too before she sits behind him, scooting backwards until her shoulders are flush with the middle of his back, her little sweaty fingers are brushing his. “Alright,” she breathes, and sure careful hands begin to feel out the knot work, skimming over his skin in short efficient swipes.

Zuko keeps an eye on the Earthbenders as Smellerbee fiddles with his bindings. They aren’t watching the refugees below, more interested in the belongings they’re unloading from the wagon. Zuko wonders if that means they’re arrogant, or if they’ve just done this often enough to become lax. Maybe they just don’t expect anyone to try anything out here; it’s not like it would be easy to find their way out of the desert with no food, water, map.

“Spirits,” Smellerbee mutters. “Was this thing wet when they put it on?”

“Yes,” Zuko says, surprised. “Why?”

“I think it’s a strip of animal skin. It contracted when it dried, making the knots undoable. Gotta be tight as all hell by now. Can you feel your fingers?”

“…not well,” Zuko admits, chafing at the necessity of voicing this weakness. The numbness is better than before, when all he could feel was pain, but it’s still not a good sign. “It’s better than when I could.”

“The pain is probably less,” Smellerbee grumbles darkly, “but it’s more dangerous this way. Damn it. If they’d just been rope like mine we could have tried to run for it tonight. What did you do?”

“I fought.” Zuko blinks, processing the rest of her sentence. “You can get out of your ropes tonight?”

“I can get out now,” Smellerbee murmurs, pulling ineffectively at his wrists one more time before leaning back against him with a sigh.

“That’s a good skill,” Zuko notes, staying as still as he can and wondering how, exactly, he's supposed to react to someone leaning their weight into him like he's someone who can hold them up.

“Yeah, well,” Smellerbee mumbles, sounding embarrassed. “I’ve been working on my knot work. Sorry. Now we’ll have to wait until we’re already away and cut you out.”

“Cut me out?” Zuko twists to look at her, surprised.

Smellerbee turns to smirk at him, no child and all warrior. “You didn’t really think they got ALL of my knives, did you?”  
Zuko suddenly feels the paper of the missive the rebel who'd set them up with the caravan had given him pressed against his chest inside his shirt and realizes these desert Benders aren't used to people who hide things, people like them.

Zuko has to bow his head to hide the sudden light in his eyes, and stops trying to tell himself he isn’t glad Smellerbee’s there.

\---

Zuko sleeps fitfully. It’s not a seldom experience, but usually Zuko’s able to drift back to sleep moments after he wakes, or at least get up and DO something. Now he can't move, and he can't sleep. His arms are mostly numb, and when he shifts pain spikes up into his shoulders. Every time he settles to sleep his muscles relax, and the pain is back. Zuko tries to find a better position but just ends up jarring his shoulders. He has to stop and breathe until the white hot agony has died away into a low numb throbbing.

“That’s it,” Smellerbee murmurs and small hands are on him, one on his higher shoulder and one on his forearm. He flinches away reflexively, and receives a small slap and a hissed “Stop it, I’m helping.”

“You’re hands are free,” he notes dumbly.

“Its fine,” Smellerbee huffs, nearly inaudible, and keeps moving clearly liberated hands over his aching shoulders. “There’s no moon and we’re in the dune’s shadow, its dark as tar. They can’t see us.”

“This would be a good time to escape,” he points out.

“Yeah, no kidding,” Smellerbee murmurs, digging sure fingers into the meat of his shoulder. Zuko grits his teeth and doesn’t make a sound of pain but really wants to. “Too bad you can’t move two inches without groaning in pain.”

“I wouldn't-” Zuko starts but cuts off, clenching his teeth as Smellerbee twists her fist into one particularly painful knot and his breath leaves him in a whoosh. A silent whoosh.

“…Okay, you have pretty amazing pain tolerance,” she admits. “Still, you wouldn’t be able to help moving slower, and I can't cut through this damn stuff without making noise. It’s too risky. We'll have to wait for a better opportunity.”

“It’s not that risky for you to try it,” Zuko points out, wondering how Smellerbee missed this. “It would even lower the risk, escaping alone.”

The hands on his arm still. “Alone.”

It seems she really hadn’t thought about that. Zuko breathes in, carefully crushing the desperate instinct which screams that Smellerbee is the best ally he has, and if his own survival might not be possible without her. He crushes it, viciously. He has no right to Smellerbee’s loyalty, and to talk her into staying in this situation purely to further his own survival…

It’s what his father would probably do. It’s what Azula would do, definitely. It's what he would have done, a month ago, even. But… Zuko is something else now, something not Fire and not Prince, and he can’t risk her dying when she could have survived, just for him. Just to save her enemy, if she knows it or not.

So he doesn't plead with her or try to find something he has to trade for her assistance. "You don't need me," he says instead, and then, “I don’t suppose I could convince you to leave me your knife?”

The hands leave him completely. He listens for the sound of her fetching her blade, or leaving, but she doesn’t do anything but breathe a little faster. She just stays there breathing for a long time, and Zuko begins to tense, wondering if there's something wrong. “Smellerbee?”

“Turn over.”

Zuko squints, confused. “What?”

“Turn over,” Smellerbee snaps, sounding annoyed and barely keeping her voice low and unnoticeable, and she sounds disappointed in him and she has no RIGHT, and he has no idea what he did. “I need to get at the other shoulder.”

“What did I-”

“Turn over.”

He does, with her help, wincing. The arm she'd been working on does feel a bit better, he notes. He can’t see more than Smellerbee’s silhouette, but while the hand she digs into the newly accessible knots is firm and steady, the one laying across his upper arm is shaking.

“You’re upset,” Zuko murmurs blankly. “Why?”

Smellerbee laughs, very quietly, sounding angry and incredulous and not a bit happy. “Spirits,” she says when she stops. “Jet can sure pick ‘em, can’t he.”

Zuko glowers at her, grateful for more familiar ground. “Jet didn’t- I’m not his.”

“I don’t care,” Smellerbee hisses, her face suddenly very close to his, her fingers talons in his clothing, “if you think you’re Jet’s or not. If you ever tell me to leave you to die again, I will kick your ass so hard your grandchildren will come out of their momma’s coochies with migraines. Do you understand?”

Zuko… really really doesn’t, the only person he thinks might put themselves on the line for him is his uncle and even he didn’t protest when Zuko said they should split up, so he must understand how bad an idea it is to be connected to Zuko. But this... He’s known this girl for a little over a week, and nothing at all about this makes sense. So he grabs onto what does.

“I’m not going to die,” he sneers at her and believes it. He’s been through so much, he knows how much he can take. He knows he’ll survive because there is no other option, and he doesn't NEED anyone to make that happen.

Smellerbee’s fingers clench tighter. “I know you aren’t,” she says, “Because I’m going to help you and you’re going to help me, and we’re gonna keep anything bad from happening to each other. That’s how friendship works, by the way, since you apparently have no experience in the area at all.” With that she lets go, twisting to sit with her back to him and her knees drawn to her chest.

“I didn’t say we were friends.” Zuko says, as sharply as he can while still speaking near a whisper.

“Too bad,” Smellerbee retorts firmly. “You told me to leave you. Which means you’re obviously insane and don’t get a say.”

She crosses her skinny little arms over her knees and hunches up like a grumpy little animal and Zuko can't grasp his anger and irritation hard enough not to feel raw and open and sickeningly young at her words. He can’t think of a way to get her to go, and he realizes he's fallen into a trap he didn’t even know he had to watch for. He’s been trying so hard not to get attached to Jet and his, and he never thought about them getting attached to HIM.

There is not going to be a casual wave and parting of ways when they make it to Ba Sing Se. There is no way this can end without these kids who've already taken so much more than they deserve getting hurt. Getting hurt by him.

“Go to sleep, Blue,” Smellerbee sighs, the first time she’s called him that name. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”

And despite everything, for one inexplicable hidden moment, that makes Zuko smile.

\--

They’re made to move again at first light. By then Zuko doesn’t even mind. He had no idea how cold a desert night could be without a fire to sleep around, and there’s a chill lodged in his very bones themselves.

Zuko hates the cold.

Three more of the Earthbenders have joined the group, these riding a strange craft which uses the wind from the small tunnels of sand they bend before large tan sails to move across the desert, like a sailboat across the ocean. Anything taken from the refugees and the wagon that was deemed valuable are loaded onto the craft. Zuko twitches as he sees one of Smellerbee’s knives packed into the animal hide sacks hanging from the sides of the craft, and idly works through a few strategies on how to attain them. None of his lazy plans have much chance of success, but they make him feel better, like he’s doing something productive.

There’s a refugee, a young man not much older than Zuko, who doesn’t get up when their captors yell at them to get moving. One of the Earthbenders nudges him with the sand, none to gently, and his head lulls to the side, glassy eyes staring out at nothing. Seeing nothing.

The bender huffs and moves away, disinterested. Zuko stares at the corpse and clenches his fists behind him. He was right here, Zuko thinks. He was steps away and he didn’t even notice when the man died. No one did.

“Hey, come on,” Smellerbee coaxes him, brushing her shoulder against his. Her hands are tied behind her back again with knots she tied behind herself with expert dexterity before the sun came up, and Zuko’s arms, while still uncomfortable, aren’t coursing with agony like they were the previous night.

“Do you know his name?” he asks her, not looking away.

“No.”

“Does- does anyone know his name?”

“Someone does,” she says. “Someone will miss him.”

It’s a hollow comfort, a lacking elegy, but it’s all they have to give.

Jet would know his name.

An Earthbender steps closer to them, one Zuko doesn’t recognize but was obviously been near enough to hear their conversation. Zuko tenses, ready for some type of punishment, but instead the man just stares at them. His eyes are thoughtful and what’s visible of his dark face solemn. He lifts an arm towards the body after a few moments of silence and Zuko watches as he gently covers the corpse with sand. Zuko frowns at the unexpected kindness and turns back to the Earthbender, but the man is gone, disappearing into the press of people moving around them.

It’s different walking with people beside him. It’s easier to find a rhythm, and not to think too much. Concentrating on the sound of feet shuffling through sand the patterns of breath erases any sense of time, gives Zuko something to think about other than the fact that he hasn’t eaten or drunk anything since they were taken, the ever growing dizziness and loss of balance and clear thinking.

The sound of the vessel skinning over the waves of earth in wide circles is another instrument in the almost cloying symphony of their movement. Zuko feels entranced, kind of like how he feels when meditating in front of a candle.

Zuko isn’t thinking very well anymore, he realizes, but in a distant and unfeeling kind of way. Nothing much matters but the sun and the sand anyways.

Smellerbee stumbles a bit as she trudges along beside him, and if her thoughts are twisting too he cannot tell. Her eyes are hooded and her face red, burned by the sun the same way Zuko’s sure he is. He may be more resilient to Agni’s touch than someone of the Earth Kingdom, but even Fire Nation blood can’t stand against the heat of the Si Wong desert forever. He can feel the unpleasant itch of tight skin over his face and neck, and wonders if he’s just burn and recover, or tan. He never has tanned. It isn’t proper for someone of the royal family, getting sunburned or gaining color, their pale untouched skin a subtle proclamation that Agni has chosen them, and will not bring harm of any kind upon their family.

The only time this has happened before was once in their house on the Ember Islands. Zuko got a sunburn when Azula locked him out of the house for several hours, and his father had frowned at his reddened skin and said his appearance was disgraceful and ordered him to stay inside and out of sight until he had lost all signs of Agni’s punishment.

Azula had gone back to the palace the next day with their father, but their mother had stayed with Zuko. They had played games and read stories and made believe throughout the house, and Ursa had regaled Zuko with tales of when she was a child, tan and burned and happy as she climbed and swam and played with her friend Ikem.

“We didn’t think of it as a punishment,” she mused, rubbing salve over Zuko’s peeling arms. “We thought of it as Agni’s kiss. That He was happy to see us playing in His light, and had touched us as a parent would run a hand over a child’s head.”

She had run her hand over her head that same way, and hugged him gently, mindful of his soreness.

“If this is Agni’s kiss, why does it hurt?” Zuko had pouted.

Ursa had laughed. “Because Agni is great and mighty and unimaginably powerful. He cannot hold back that power, even in His love, so even His kindness stings.”

Zuko had nodded, understanding. He had wondered if perhaps his own father was like that. He would just have to learn to find the love in the sting.

The Earthbenders let them stop eventually, and it is only Smellerbee’s shoulder wedged beneath his own which keeps Zuko from falling on his face. They section the refugees off into clusters, murmuring quietly amongst themselves as they provide strips of dried meat and meager swallows of water.

Be some uncommon stroke of luck, the man with the water skin is closest to Smellerbee and Zuko’s group when the battle cry rings out.

Zuko ducks down on instinct as the sand erupts around them. Grunts and cries of pain along with calls of triumph and the ringing yell of “Raiders!” and the sorry procession explodes into chaos.

“Get up, get up!” Smellerbee shouts, working her hands loose in seconds and tugging Zuko upright. She darts for the nearest Earthbender, bringing the distracted man down with an elbow to the side and a fist to the temple when he doubles over in pain and lunges for the water skin attached to his belt. The man, who had sunk to his knees at Smellerbee’s blow, reaches out with a startled sound, his fingers grazing the waterskin’s strap when Zuko smashes his foot into his face and he falls away from Smellerbee, hitting the ground with a thud and not moving again.

Smellerbee crouches, pulling the dark blue cloth she uses as a headband from around her forehead and carefully applying enough of the precious water to the cloth for the cloth to drip.

“What are you doing?” Zuko hisses, looking around wildly as he tries to keep track of the danger around them. There are several clusters of Earthbenders, tossing waves and spikes and whirlwinds of sand back and forth. The refugees are exposed and vulnerable, hiding where they can and running when they can't. Zuko sees one bound man walk straight into an attack and get thrown several paces away with a heavy cracking sound and not move again.

“Here,” Smellerbee says, darting behind Zuko to wrap her wet headband around his bonds. “That should start to loosen the knots.”

A man with blood down the side of his face careens into Zuko, grasping at his shirt with desperate hands. He stares at him in raw exposed fear, clawing at Zuko’s clothes, the cloth he’d been covering his face with flapping behind him in the wind of the battle. He isn’t a refugee, but Zuko can’t tell which side of the battle he’s on, that of their captors or the raiders. It doesn’t matter; the man won’t let go so Zuko brings his head sharply against the man's, feels the nose crack open against his skull and warm blood soak into his hair. The man crumbles and Zuko steps over him, his mind bright and clear, his earlier lethargy vanishing in the heat of battle.

Smellerbee isn’t beside him anymore, and Zuko’s heart leaps in sudden blind panic, where is, she, why isn't she- This is why Zuko doesn't DO people. “Smellerbee!” he yells.

“Here!” She yelps, and skitters around a group of fleeing refugees to slide to a stop at his side. There’s a new cut on her lower face, a small knife with blood on its blade held tightly in her fist and her eyes are as bright and fierce as any Fire Nation woman's.

“We need to find the sand boat thing,” She says, scanning the melee from her tiptoes.

Zuko snorts in grim amusement, ducking under a flying spike of sand. “That’s easy. Where’s the fighting thickest?”

He's right, when they find the sand boat it’s covered in tan clothed desert people, sand and wind whipping around and out in intricate and indiscernible patterns.

“I’m going to be useless in that.” Zuko tells her as they watch the lightning quick fight progress, smarting the knowledge. He’s tired and starved and weak, and too much of his attention is spent on not falling over. He can't handle stealth right now.

“Yeah.” Smellerbee steps close and slips the wet cloth off of his wrist and her thin knife into Zuko’s hands. “Work on that, don’t move.”

“Wait!” Zuko yelps, but he doesn't know what to say next.

“I’ll come back,” Smellerbee tells him firmly, and Zuko believes her because... because he really wants to, like she believes Jet. He nods sharply and she nods back and charges down the hill and into the confusion.

Zuko grinds his jaw as he loses sight of her and turns the knife to begin sawing at his bindings. They're looser than they were and the animal skin gives under the blade, but loudly, and slowly. It will be a while before Zuko can pull free.

An Earthbender stumbles upon him, and Zuko widens his stance and starts pinpointing weak spots, but-

But it’s the man who buried the body, who showed that one thread of decency, his eyes open and young and expecting to die.

And the only thing Zuko has to listen to anymore is his own instincts, so he leaps over him and turns in midair to plow his feet into the man calling a wave of sand into being behind Zuko’s former captor. Flesh gives way beneath his heel and the attacker collapses. Zuko stumbles to his knees when he lands, grits his teeth and doesn't look down, doesn't want to know if the man survived his attack, and turns to regard the Earthbender, who is staring at him with uncomprehending eyes.

“One kindness deserves another,” he says, his words clear in a sudden lull in the battle.

And then Smellerbee's racing back up the hill, his Dao sheath under her arm and at least three knives strapped to her body, a pack hopefully full of provisions slung over her back. "Blue, let's go!" she shouts.

Zuko looks around for fellow refugees, anyone they can help, but the only ones he can see are still on the ground and someone's yelling from the sand boat and there’s no time to check to see if they're still breathing. So when Smellerbee nears him he takes off, pacing himself to her as they run, weaving in and out of the fight until there’s nothing around them but sand and sun, the sounds of battle growing fainter.

He hears a scream behind them, and he aches because there was nothing he could do. He wasn't enough, he never is, and everything he touches seems to crumble to ash.

But Smellerbee is running, quick and strong beside him. She stayed with him even though it was stupid... and she still got out.

Zuko doesn't know what that means exactly, but he knows it means something.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Depictions of suffocation.
> 
> A crude word for a woman's privates is used.
> 
> Non-graphic and graphic descriptions of violence and death.


	3. Blindspots

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jet has an epiphany while searching for Blue and Smellerbee.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MERRY CHRISTMAS!! I'm BAAACK! Schools out so I had the time. It's been a while, but I'm not that sorry; I tend to write myself into a corner and the break from TBP has let me peer down enough side streets to choose which one I want to take. I think the story will be better for it.
> 
> There are some things in this chapter that will make more sense if you've recently read the series, or at least read the first chapter of Kings of Nowhere recently. That's the bad thing about long waits between updates, sorry about that.
> 
> Warnings in endnotes.

The sun climbs the sky like an enemy; huge, hot, and inescapable.

Jet clenches his fists in the back of Longshot’s shirt until the color bleeds from his knuckles, eyes aching as they search the forever empty desert surrounding them. There is no sound but the plod of the ostrich-horse’s talons in the soft sand and a barely present wind, hot and dry, whispering over the desert. Jet leans into Longshot’s back and braces his chin against his friend’s shoulder, allowing himself the small relief of not having to hold his own head up, of sharing the shade from Longshot’s hat. Longshot is as straight and sure as always, forever the steadiest of them, but there’s the slightest give in how he leans back into Jet that reveals his fatigue. Neither of them are used to riding a mount, much less riding one for a long time over long distances, and they’ve been trying their best to save the water and food they brought for when they find Smellerbee and Blue. They’re both tired and sore.

Jet’s clothing is wet with sweat and sticks to his skin. His mouth is dry and his head throbs. He feels itchy and uncomfortable under his mismatched armor and arm guards, and the handles of his hook swords are hot to the touch.

The sun keeps rising. There are no tracks, no landmarks. All they can do is use the direction the dying man gave them and hope for the best, hope that they haven’t passed their lost companions already in this massive expanse of dunes and sun. Hope they aren’t already dead.

Jet hates this desert.

He grits his teeth against the fear climbing up his throat and stares harder, hard enough his eyes sting, refusing to let himself doubt.

They’ll find them.

They’ll find them.

Any moment. Any moment could be the one where he sees them.

It could be only that one moment, a single glimpse of something that doesn’t fit, a slight change of color between the dunes before it’s hidden again.

If he relaxes, if he stops looking, if he misses it…

He won’t get a second chance.

He has to see them.

He might have already missed them.

No.

The sand slides under the Ostrich-horses talons as it stops, the motion causing Jet to jerk back, his half closed eyes popping back open, _shit_.

Longshot twists to stare at him, eyes dark with thought. With careful movements he unhooks the water skin from where it’s tied to the saddle in front of him and holds it out to Jet.

“I’m fine,” Jet says, gently pushing the skin away. His throat aches at the words. How long has it been since he’s spoken? Since the dying man (the dead man) probably. He rubs at his eyes with fingers sore from clutching to Longshot and carefully doesn’t think about anything but moving forward.

Longshot frowns, his lips a hard line against his travel dirty face. He holds out the skin again, tipping it in his hand so that Jet can hear the water moving within it. There’s still a fair amount.

Jet is taking it before he’s quite realized he’s moving at all. He stares at it for a moment, considering its weight, before carefully popping the cork. He makes sure to keep his dirty fingers away from the mouth of the container. He killed a man with these hands.

No that’s not why they’re dirty, they’re dirty because they are sticky wet with sweat and crusted with desert sand, he reminds himself. His arm trembles the slightest bit when he lifts the neck to his mouth.

Smellerbee doesn’t have any water, his mind whispers.

He tips the skin, feels the shifting weight under his hand as the liquid flows towards the opening.

Blue was already half starved, just beginning to regain the sureness to his step and shape to his face. How long could he possibly last out here?

Water fills his mouth, warm-hot against his tongue, his teeth, when it hits the back of his throat.

They could be dead.

He could be sitting here drinking water while they _lay on the ground, glazed eyes and no breath, they won’t even cool in this spirits damned desert, their blood motionless in their veins but warm as the water on his tongue until nightfall finally comes to pull them into the cold-_

The water skin drops from fingers that suddenly won’t grip.

Longshot catches it by the strap before he’s spills more than a few drops, before Jet has time to do anything but panic as he chokes on the water in his throat. He coughs until his ribs ache, until his eyes sting with tears he can’t afford to shed. For several reasons.

When he raises his head Longshot is staring with such concern it feels uncouth to look, the naked emotion so stark and obvious on his usually placid face it makes Jet’s stomach turn.

“I’m fine,” Jet says. Good try, now to say it like it’s true, because they have no time for it not to be. “I’m fine Longshot. Let’s keep moving.”

Longshot keeps staring and Jet fights not to look away. Longshot’s easy to shut out like that, just by choosing not to look deep enough to understand him. Jet won’t do it; he owes the bowman this much, to watch for anything he wants to show him. He owes him everything and anything Longshot wants to take from him honestly, this talented, loyal, stupid soldier, this stupid friend of his that has somehow missed the fact that out of all the people who have ever followed Jet Longshot’s the only one left. This stubborn idiot who made it to the last stage of their trek through this death trap of a desert and then turned back because Jet said that’s what they were doing.

Jet didn’t even _ask_ him.

“You should have left with the other refugees.” Jet says, because it’s something true and sometimes he needs to remember how the truth feels when it comes out of his mouth.

Longshot furrows his brows and stares harder. Because the reason Jet didn’t ask is because Longshot never says no.

“Well then,” Jet shrugs and grins like it doesn’t hurt like a stabbing. “I should have made you leave.”

Something moves in Longshots face, something quickly there and gone, present for a moment before his face smooths out and it’s buried under a calm Jet has never been able to crack without Longshot’s permission.

That one moment is enough, though.

Jet knows fear when he sees it.

And yet Longshot is still here, beside Jet. Still his Freedom Fighter, same as always.

The first and the last apparently.

No. There’s still a chance. A small one, the rational side of Jet’s mind insists, a miniscule fraction of one, but it’s still-

“We’ll find them,” Jet says. He says it like it is cold hard fact, like it has already happened. He says it like it’s what he really believes, like the stretching sand and beating sun aren’t eating at his resolve moment by moment, like it’s what he really means.

What he really means is _I’m sorry. I’m not ready to let go_.

\--

The sun has begun to sink again when they find the tracks. It’s the first sign of humans since the dying man (the dead man, don’t think about it) and Jet almost trips in his haste to dismount from behind Longshot, to scan the marks like they can answer every question he has.

A set of footprints, deep and awkward in the loose sand. Round holes connected by shallow lines in perfect quarter circles. Two straight lines cut deep, and perfectly parallel.

“It’s like those wood sleds Sneers would make for carrying firewood, only bigger,” Jet muses. “And pulled by some kind of giant insect.”

Longshot nods in agreement. The ostrich horse sags beneath him, as tired as they are. Longshot looks down at it, concerned.

Jet frowns. “Can it still carry us?”

Longshot considers for a moment before dipping his head in an affirmative.

Jet nods back. “Then we keep riding.”

Longshot tilts his head and purses his lips, asking how long.

“As long as it takes,” Jet squares his shoulders and steps forward, running his hand over the Ostrich-horse’s heaving side. “As far as it can go.”

Longshot raises an eyebrow. And after that?

"After that,” Jet says, “we’ll walk.” Obviously.

This is their only chance. It’s Blue and Smellerbee’s only chance.

They can’t stop now.

Jet is tense, thrumming with a sudden giddy itch, the light of fevered expectation in his eyes. Longshot scoots back so that Jet can ride in front of him because he knows Jet can’t not lead like this, can’t sit back and wait, has to be one the front lines, the first attack. Jet swings up quickly, too manic to be careful about how he grasps the reins or where his heels land. The Ostrich-horse starts at the sudden change in balance and energy, jerking its head up and backtracking several steps before they settle together, Jet leaning forward and the animal following the movement in a choppy trot. He keeps his head low and his eyes on the tracks, secure in the knowledge that as long as he keeps them going the right way Longshot will see whatever they're tracking before it sees them. Jet clicks his tongue, squeezes with his legs, and leans forward and the ostrich-horse breaks into a run.

It takes nearly an hour for the beast to begin faltering regularly. It lurches beneath them, moaning when Jet presses his heels into its sides. A little farther, he murmurs to it, eyes never leaving the ground. They need to go a little farther.

Longshot’s hand, sudden on his arm.

Jet jerks the reins back, taking his eyes off the ground and scanning the horizon. Their mount skids to a stop and sways beneath them, its head bowing in relief, its breathing hard and fast. Jet can’t see anything, which is frustrating, but expected. The sun has dropped further since he last checked it, and it feels like a warning, the fuse on a case of blasting jelly. Time is nearly up.

“How many do you see?”

Longshot squints, tucks his thumb and little finger down on his left hand, then presses his thumb and pointer finger together to make a triangle.

Three structures.

Jet nods, thinks it through.“I’ll keep going, draw attention. Pick off as many as I can,” Jet checks his weapons, gives himself an estimate on how fast he could probably move while his head is throbbing in time with his pulse. “You’ll be back up, stay hidden. Be prepared to shoot. No kills unless I call for them, just injuries and cover fire.”

Longshot nods, but he’s frowning.

Jet hums in agreement. “It’s definitely not perfect, but we don’t know how many of them there are so it’s best they don’t know how many of us there are either. It’s a lot easier to assume there’s a lot of your enemy if you can’t see them.”

Longshot’s lip twitches at that, the barest hint of amusement. Jet doesn’t blame him; they’ve pulled some spectacular escapes using this strategy, back in their forest. He lets himself smirk in agreement, a silent _this has worked before_ , and _we’ve made it through worse_.

Longshot leans into his back for a fraction of a moment and then he’s on the ground. Jet tosses him the waterskin, the bag with food in it, and the one containing the animal fat Longshot uses to keep his bow in good condition. Longshot throws the bag’s straps over his shoulder and nods to him before moving away from the tracks, quick and low and stringing his bow with the ease of long practice. Jet doesn’t watch him go, just refocuses on the lines cut in the sand and nudges the ostrich-horse back into movement. It goes easily, relieved at the lessened weight and slower pace.

It is a few minutes before Jet can clearly see what Longshot did, the sharp shapes of tents rising from the sun baked earth. He readjust himself, breathes in to settle his mind, and rubs his eyes to try to dispel the headache settled behind them. Breathe out. Take the calm, wrap it around, let everything go but the mission ahead.

It’s time for battle.

They come towards him before he reaches the tents, three of them, one grey haired, one brown haired, and one young. They’re dressed in tans and deep greens, curious hats on their heads. There’s a whip curled at the hip of the young one, but the brown haired one is the only one with a weapon at ready, a spear he holds like he can use it. Jet had got much closer than he expected to.

He guesses there’s not much use for vigilance in a desert everyone claims can’t be crossed. They probably don’t have to worry about getting snuck up on very often.

Advantage Freedom Fighters.

He puts a smile on and waits until he can see their faces before lifting a hand in lazy greeting, pulling his mount to a stop and allowing himself to sway with it, displaying his fatigue like a white flag.

Friendly.

Tired.

Weak.

No threat.

“Is this the way to Ba Sing Se?” he yells out and then laughs when his voice cracks on the words, makes it heavy with weariness and crazed with despair. He breaks into a cough, not at all faked but maybe a bit exaggerated, and the spear dips down.

Two pair of eyes watch with cold disinterest, but the youngest one watches with horrified curiosity.

There’s the weak link.

“I’m afraid you’ve strayed from your path,” the gray haired man speaks, his voice high and cultured. He’s standing a bit in front, and both his companions angle themselves towards him. Leader. His eyes are narrowed in annoyance and distain, but when Jet’s hand flops carelessly onto his sword handles he doesn’t react at all, doesn’t even register a threat.

Pompous, high-born, experienced enough to think he’s seen everything, and too used to being the most devious person in a room to expect Jet.

Jet can work with this. He leans forward, places an arm tightly around his middle like he’s protecting his stomach, and keeps his eyes wide and guileless. “Water?” He croaks. “Please?”

The curious one’s taken half a step forward before he’s realized it, but the leader throws a hand to block him and he stops moving. Jet keeps his eyes on the leader’s, watches calculation sharpen his eyes.

“I’m afraid we don’t have enough to be charitable,” the man says. “Water is precious out here.”

“Please,” Jet begs shamelessly, and there it is again, the young one’s twitch forward. He’s gentler than the other two, softer. He has a conscience. That’s useful.

“There’s a trough under a tree a few miles that way,” the brown haired man intones, waving to Jet’s left. “There should still be some water in it from this morning.”

He’s lying, wants Jet out of their hair and not thinking anything past that. He’s a very good liar; Jet can’t get a thing from him but casual boredom, is probably a great one when directed by the leader. He’s only given away by the quickly buried shock on the youngest one’s face and the mean twitch of the leader’s lips. Jet has to get him out of the picture quickly; liars are dangerous, and useless to Jet’s purposes.

Jet shakes his head. “Should be? Can’t… can’t chance should be.” He looks down, considering, lets indecision and desperation chase each other over his face. “I’ll trade you something for it,” Jet purposes, like he’s trying for firm and can’t quite manage it.

And there it is, _now_ the leader’s looking at his swords, eyes sharp and greedy. He smiles suddenly, wide and fake. “I’m sure we can figure something out,” he says, his voice cultured and smooth.

Jet makes himself sag with relief and bows his head, hiding his eyes just in case he lets something slip, in case his expression gives away the thrum of _I eat filth like you for breakfast_ building in his chest.

“Here,” the younger one blurts, stepping forward and reaching for the reins. Jet lets him take them, watches as the man fumbles with the leather straps for a moment before tentatively tugging them towards the tents. The ostrich-horse goes easily, too exhausted to be concerned by who’s leading it.

Jet uses the time to survey his surroundings. There’s two fully closed in tents and one which is long and open in front. There’s two of the huge sleds things which made the tracks he’s been following, both attached to two large beetle like creatures with high saddles strapped to their backs. The ostrich horse makes a discontented sound when it sees them, but is too exhausted for anything else.

The two older men trail behind them, talking with hushed voices. They quiet when they reach the tents and don’t try to help when Jet dismounts with a stumble. The young one steps forward to steady him, the idiot, Jet could kill him five ways without putting his hands on his blades. Jet leans on him and lets himself be guided toward the tent with the open side, hyperaware that he’s probably walking into one of Longshot’s blind spots, wherever he is, but too needy for a moment in the shade to care.

Jet lets himself be eased down to the ground, mindful to keep his weapons unpinned and easily accessed. The sand is cool under his hands. He sags in genuine relief; it feels nice.

The other two are already poking through his stuff. Jet’s mind sharpens in response, trying to remember if he forgot anything that will give away the fact that he isn’t alone. He can’t think of anything.

Oh well, it’ll probably be fine. They aren’t expecting to find anything suspicious, and Jet’s confident he can lie his way through if something alarms them.

Jet turns to the man beside him and gives a weary grin. “I’m Jet. I’m really glad to see you.”

“I’m Bahn,” the man replies with a crooked grin. “How did you even get way out here?”

Jet shifts to face him, eyes wide and smile harmless. “I was an idiot, tried to go it alone. There are rumors of a caravan that takes refugees through but I didn’t want to wait.” He ruffles his hair, sheepish.

Bahn nods. “Yeah, I’ve heard they come through. Haven’t seen them myself.”

Jet hums, hides the crushing disappointment the statement brings. He tells himself it isn’t over; Bahn is young and soft and out of all of them he who would be entrusted with the least information.

“What are you guys doing out here?” Jet asks.

The man’s face lights up in honest pleasure. “We’re merchants, here to trade with the Si Wong tribes.”

Jet's eyes light with genuine interest. “The Si Wong tribes?”

“Yeah,” Bahn replies easily. “There’s a couple groups of nomads who live out here, though I have no idea how they manage. They’re very happy to trade.”

“They must be interesting people.”

“Oh very,” Bahn grins. “They’re almost scary when you first see them. They cover every inch of themselves with cloth to protect them from the sun, and their bending is unlike anything you’ve ever seen.”

Jet’s eyes widen in faked admiration. “An you trade with them? Just the three of you?”

Bahn laughs. “There’s usually more of us, we’re just the scouts, here to set up camp. The others will be here with more supplies in a couple more days.”

Jet nods in understanding. “I see. You said something about bending?”

Bahn nods. “It’s incredible. Unique.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Jet shrugs, moving his eyes back to the ostrich-horse as if he’s tired of the subject matter. “I’ve seen some extraordinary bending. Can’t be that special.”

“It is,” Bahn insists, leaning forward, so eager to impress. “Watching a sandbender… I swear the way they move sand has to be like what airbenders did before the war.”

 _There are people inside the sand_ the dead man had said.

“And you trade with them?” Jet prods, keeping his voice disinterested. Careful, he can’t come on as too concerned with the answers. People give so much more to people who are hard to please. He checks on the other two, looks like they’re finishing up surveying his belongings. He only has a few more minutes; the man beside him will be much tighter lipped when the leader is listening in. “I can’t imagine much of worth coming out of this place.”

“I didn’t either,” Bahn chuckles, “But they’re pretty ingenious. There’s a cactus out here, its juice is the most potent thing I’ve ever tasted. You’ll see colors that don’t even exist, I swear. Then there’s this type of honey any number of nobles will pay a hefty price for. They’ll catch exotic animals for us too; circuses will pay well for something no one’s seen before.”

Nothing about raiding refugee caravans, but he wouldn’t tell Jet that if he knew. His instincts say Bahn is ignorant, but it’s safer to push a little further just in case. Instinct isn’t something to be counted on.

“Exotic animals are all you sell to the circus?” he asks, lets his interest heighten a bit, just enough to keep the man thinking more of the payoff of Jet’s admiration than what he’s saying.

“Well, mostly. We can pass off more common creatures to Fire Nation circuses.”

Jet stills. “You can what?” _What!?_

“They don’t really know any better,” the man explains, mistaking Jet’s horror for confusion. “They haven't been settled this far out very long. If you tell them a rabbit-lope is a once in a lifetime find they’ll believe you.”

Settled. Like they just moved into town, the new neighbor down the street. Like the word means something other than fire and death and terror. _Settled_.

The man smirks for a moment before it fades into a frown. “Are you alright? You look kind of sick.”

“Dizzy,” Jet manages.

“That’s right, you’ve got to feel awful.” The man places a hand on Jet’s shoulder. It takes everything in him not to lash out, not to throw the man off and stab him the _swine-licking traitor_. “Hey, are you done? He’s not looking very good,” the man calls out to the other merchants.

The leader looks over at them, his lips pulled down in a restrained rebuke. “I’m afraid you don’t have anything I’m interested in.”

“C’mon, he’s not going to make it much longer, I’m sure we can-”

“Bahn,” the leader snaps. “When I want to hear your voice I’ll ask for it.”

The man’s hand clenches protectively around Jet’s arm ( _get off get off get off_ ) frustration naked on his face.

Jet slams his eyes closed. He has to adjust, has to put this all aside and focus on what matters. Blue and Smellerbee are depending on him. These men are his best chance at finding them, or at least stealing enough supplies to get him and Longshot a little closer.

Everything else can wait until his Freedom Fighters are safe.

Jet opens his eyes again when he feels the panicked fury settle into a dull hate in his chest, looks up at the leader who’s regarding him coolly.

“Nothing at all?” Jet asks meekly, and moves his gaze to the water skin on the leader’s thigh with mostly feigned longing. “There’s nothing I have that you’ll take in exchange for a little water?”

“Well, those swords of yours are quite unique,” the man states, like he’s just been struck by the thought and hasn’t had his eye on Jet’s swords since the beginning.

Jet hunches down, placing his hands on his hilts protectively and pulling his elbows in to make himself look smaller. He’s not as young as he used to be so it’s harder for him to make himself seem harmless while armed than it once was, but he’s still young enough that most people still give that tiny bit of ground when he looks lost and alone. It’s helpful when dealing with bleeding hearts or predators, and right now he’s managing both. “I need my swords. I’m not safe without them.”

“You won’t need them much longer,” the leader points out. “You’re heading for Ba Sing Se, correct? It’s safe there.”

Jet frowns. “Maybe.”

“Besides, that won’t matter if you don’t make it out of the desert, will it?”

Jet looks down indecisively. “Well, I guess you’re right.” He looks up, grins. “I guess it’s not that bad of a deal after all.”

The man nods, reaching out. The man beside Jet sighs, obviously unhappy.

Jet fumbles with the clasp where his swords hook to his belt for a moment before he stills his hands, tilts his head like he’s considering something.

Tighten the strings.

“I don’t have all day,” the leader snaps.

“Sorry,” Jet smiles sheepishly. “I was just thinking, maybe you would like something I dumped better than these old things.” He taps his knuckles on his sword hilt.

The leader blinks. “Something you dumped?”

“Yeah. My ostrich-horse wasn’t doing well, I had to get rid of some weight. So I tossed some stuff. Nonessentials, you know? Family heirlooms and things. They won’t really be much use to me anyway, but I’m sure they’d be worth more than my swords are, there’s some jewelry, a metal tea pot, I think.”

Make the loop.

Jet tilts his head, guileless. “I could lead you there.”

“You can’t go by yourself?”

Jet shakes his head, glum. “My arms feel like they’re made of paper. I’m going to need help gathering everything. Some of it’s heavy.”

The leader nods, his greed blinding him to the holes in Jet’s lie. The good liar is more suspicious, frowning at him with narrow eyes. He’s the biggest threat here.

“We can’t go with you though,” Bahn muses, “We’re expecting a visitor.”

The leader’s eyes sharpen in warning and the man winces, but the damage is already done.

Jet breaths in, focuses on not letting his eyes sharpen, his fists clench. Their supplier probably means _sandbender._ Definitely means a _lead_. “Well maybe one of you can go with me and the other two stay here to wait.” He turns towards Bahn, smiles. “Would you mind?”

“I’ll do it,” the good liar says sharply.

And pull the knot tight.

Jet turns his smile on the brown haired man, and he knows there’s an edge to it that he can’t quite hide. “That sounds perfect.”

\--

Jet steals back to the camp on careful feet, as quietly as he can. It’s impossible to be completely silent in the deep shifting sand, but with the liberal use of sand dunes and the tents as cover he manages to reach the outskirts of the encampment unseen.

“Please,” an unfamiliar voice begs. Jet crouches lower and slows, trying to catch the words and remain undetected. “You know what the Haumi do to people. Half of my tribe’s young men are in their clutches.”

“I don’t know quite what you want from us,” the leader drawls. “We aren’t raiders, like you. Fights and rescues are far beyond our skills.”

“Say you won’t trade with them,” the voice says immediately, so fast Jet has trouble making out the words. “Say you won’t accept wares gained by the mistreatment on my comrades.”

“Why would I do that?”

Jet peeks around the tent he’s been using as cover, carefully. There’s a man matching Bahn’s description of a Sandbender slumped in the mouth of the same three sides tent Jet had been earlier, covered in tan cloth everywhere but his face, which is drawn in shock. “What?” he sputters.

“Why would I jeopardize my standing with the Haumi tribe to save you’re men from their own foolishness?” the leader sneers. “This wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t been trying to steal their sand glider.”

“We did steal their sand glider,” the sandbender hisses. He sounds young, both in voice and in the petulance his words are soaked in.

“I still don’t understand why I should side with you,” the leader says. “The Haumi bring in goods worth ten times what you drag in.”

“People will die!” the Sandbender exclaims, sounding younger than his face suggests. “ _My_ people.”

“Ah, and that’s the crux of it, isn’t it,” The leader nods condescendingly. “It’s fine if its nameless refugees doing the dirty work, but as soon as it’s _your people’s_ lives on the line you lose your nerve.”

Jet grins, hard as diamond.

Finally.

The leader shakes his head. “If you plan to trade with us in the future I suggest you stop being such a _child_.”

“Refugees?” Bahn asks. “What do you mean, lives on the line?”

“I’m a bit curious about that myself,” Jet drawls, stepping out from behind the tent and walking towards the three men.

All three sets of eyes snap to him. “Jet?” Bahn murmurs in confusion. "You’re back already? Where’s your ostrich-horse?” The Sandbender looks towards him, obviously expecting an explanation. The leader’s eyes are glued to what the other two had missed; the blood on the bare blades of Jet’s hook swords.

“Where is Sei?” the Leader snaps, voice tight with rage and fear.

Jet shrugs and keeps walking, taking advantage of his opponent’s shock to shorten the distance between them. “Oh, don’t worry. I’m sure he’ll live. Well, mostly sure. Seems you don’t like losing your men any more than the Sandbender does, huh?”

Bahn gasps, finally catching sight of Jet’s swords. “You-!”

Jet moves. Two quick steps and he’s on the Sandbender, almost before the man can yelp in alarm. He hooks his sword around his ankle just as the man scrambles to his feet, twists as he steps behind him so that they’re back to back and yanks. Jet grunts at the sudden weight against his back, squares his hips, drops his unoccupied sword to reach back and grab the man’s tunic and throws him bodily over his shoulder and into the back of the tent, scoops up his blade and back pedals out of the way as the canvas collapses under the weight.

He darts at the leader in that bare second when the Sandbender is disoriented and disconnected from his element. By the time the bender has struggled free of the tarp Jet has his blades crossed over the leader’s vulnerable throat.

Everyone freezes.

Jet makes eye contact with both men before focusing on the Sandbender. “If you want your men back you better keep me happy, because as far as I can tell both your livelihood and your men’s lives depend on this filth’s survival.”

Once Jet is suitably convinced neither man will risk moving he bends until his mouth is even with the leader’s ear, noting how the man shakes against him. Seems he isn’t so confident anymore, now that Jet’s the one in control. “For the record I don’t really like losing my people either,” Jet purrs. “It really pisses me off, actually.”

Jet leans back and smiles. “Now, which of you sorry excuses for human beings wants to tell me just what the Haumi tribe does with refugees, and how I can get them back?”

The two men just stare.

Jet widens his smile and presses the blade into the Leader’s throat. The man chokes, arching his neck back to keep the pressure off of his windpipe.

“Okay, okay!” Bahn yelps, throwing his hands up in surrender. “Don’t kill him!” he fixes the Sandbender with pleading eyes. “You know what’s going on, right? Tell him what he wants to know!”

“I-” the sandbender twitches like he wants to fight and Jet hikes his arm up in response, letting the blade scrape up the man’s neck. He can’t see from his position, but the way the Sandbender pales makes him think he’s drawn blood. “The Haumi tribe trades a type of honey that’s very dangerous to get to. I know they round up refugees to do the hard work and that a lot of them die, but that’s all I know. I swear it.” He swallows. “They have some of my men too. We’re the same-”

“Shut up,” Jet snarls. “Where do they find this honey?”

“There’s a huge rock over in that direction,” Bahn speaks up, pointing into the desert. Jet breaks eye contact with the Sandbender and notes where the trader’s pointing, its position in relation to the sun. “It’s huge, I saw it when we came in. Sei,” his voice cracks. “Sei said it was a hive.”

Jet catches movement in the side of his eye and jerks himself and his captive backwards as sand hurtles past them before abruptly dropping, the same moment the sandbender drops, and arrow through his shoulder.

Jet uses the moment of disorder to lower his swords and crack his elbow into the leader’s neck, knocking him out cold. He'll need him later. He turns back to the sandbender, crouched and ready, but the man is pressing his palm to his shoulder and pulling it back, staring with horrified eyes like he’s never seen his own blood before. Judging his will to fight broken, Jet turns to Bahn, lifts his swords.

Bahn is trembling, terrified. “You’re a monster.”

Jet stares, laughs. Bahn flinches. “I’m a monster? I’m not the one trading with the Fire Nation.”

“What? It’s not-“ Bahn swallows. “There’s nothing wrong with-”

“The nobles you sell the honey to,” Jet interrupts, “They aren’t Earth are they?”

Bahn twitches.

“Of course they aren’t,” Jet muses. His heart is hard and cold. He imagines what Bahn would look like dead in the sand. "Of course this is because of the Fire Nation, it _always is_.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bahn wimpers.

“I know you don’t,” Jet says, deceptively gentle. “that’s the only reason you aren’t dead yet.”

He looks over at the Sandbender. The man’s still staring at his blood wet hand.

Jet turns back to Bahn just as the man brings some kind of tube to his mouth. Jet drops instantly, hears the _thwip_ of some type of projectile go over his head, rears up with a roar and forces Bahn’s legs out from under him with a swinging kick.

Bahn lands on his back, the air slammed from his lungs, his ridiculous hat flying from his head, the tube from his hand. He tries to curl up but Jet is there instantly, crouching beside him, keeping him pinned down with a leg on his thigh and his back from arching to relieve the pain with a fistful of his hair.

“Let me explain this to you,” Jet seethes conversationally. “The Fire Nation keeps pushing further and further into our homeland, burning villages, ruining crops, killing people. Those lucky enough to survive run.” He gives Bahn a shake. “With me so far?” Waits until the man stops gasping for breath and nods.

“Good.” There’s a shift in the sand behind him, the familiar sound of an arrow cutting through air, hitting flesh, and the sandbender’s choked moan as he drops again. Jet doesn’t look, too caught up in the fear in Bahn’s eyes, the confusion. Jet is going to MAKE him understand. “You want to know what happens next? I’ll tell you.”

“These lucky ones try to cross this desert, because they’re desperate, because the Fire Nation isn’t here yet and they are nearly everywhere else. And guess what? It doesn’t matter. Fire Nation doesn’t have to be here because you’re here, and you’ll do the dirty work _for them_.”

“I never hurt any-”

I’m not done,” Jet snarls, pressing his knee down sharply. Bahn gasps in pain. Jet hears the now familiar sound of ostrich-horse talons in sand. Longshot is coming. “You _trade_ with the bastards. The Fire Nation’s greed spreads to you, and yours to the Sandbenders, and they think _you know how we can make more money?_ We can _use the refugees!_ And then you sit here and say you’ve never hurt anyone, you spineless worthless _traitor._ ”

“Don’t kill me,” Bahn sobs his hands worrying uselessly at Jet’s arms, “Don’t kill me.”

“I wouldn’t kill you,” Jet ruffles the man’s hair in a parody of affection, just the slightest bit painfully. “I would cut you open and leave you here for the animals to eat. I’d just open a wound and not turn back to help. That seems fair, doesn’t it?”

A hand settles on Jet’s shoulder. He grits his teeth. “He deserves it,” Jet argues. “He _does_.”

The hand tightens.

“This wouldn’t have happened if he wasn’t here!” Jet growls. He turns back to Bahn, who’s finally crying. “My friends could be dead _because of YOU!”_

The hand grips his shoulder and pulls with staggering force, sending Jet tumbling back in the sand.

Jet jerks back up, seething. Longshot stands between him and Bahn, mouth drawn in a thin line, eyes steady and fists clenched.

“This is your line?” he sneers. “The first time you _ever_ tell me no and it’s for _this_ swine?”

Longshot dips his head in a slight nod.

Jet clenches his fists so hard his bones ache. “He deserves it. _Look at what he’s done._ ”

Longshot’s mouth tightens and he steps to the side so that he isn’t blocking the other man, his fists still clentched and his shoulders taunt.

_Look at him._

Jet does.

He’s curled on his side now, sobbing messily. Jet catches the stench of urine. He looks young. He looks Earth Kingdom.

Jet shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter. He’s with _them_. He’s _infected_.”

“I won’t, I won’t I won’t,” Bahn gasps. “I’ll never trade with them again, _please_.”

Jet turns away, disgusted. He kicks at the moaning sandbender, the spoiled accomplice to this madness who doesn’t even know how to fight while in pain, the sheltered coward, pases in a tight angry circle.

“It’s a mercy,” Jet throws at Longshot.

“Please, please,” Bahn whimpers.

“SHUT UP!” Jet roars.

There’s suddenly silence. There is no sound but Bahn’s ragged breathing, the sandbender’s, Jet’s.

Breath in, breathe out.

“This is why flooding the town was the right decision.” Jet tells Longshot. “The Fire Nation is a disease. Even if you throw them out it doesn’t matter, the damage is done. These people are infected! Their souls have been eaten away by the evil the Fire Nation brought. This never would have happened before the war!” Jet grits his teeth. “There would be no refugees to abduct. No market for honey so expensive it justifies killing your own people. No dying children, no rampant greed! Everything the Fire Nation touches is ruined. They’re already _corrupted!_ ” He grits his teeth, grip the hilts of his weapons. “You think I’m going _too far?_ Killing them is _mercy!_ They’ve been twisted and the only good option is to put the poor bastards out of their misery before they spread this wasting disease any farther!”

“Twisted,” Longshot says, his voice as cutting as his arrows. It’s always such a stinging shock when Longshot puts words where Jet doesn’t expect any. “Twisted like you?”

Jet stops breathing. Starts again.

“Say that again,” he hisses, voice a dark warning. _“Say that again._ ”

Longshot says nothing. He doesn’t have to. His words are already digging into Jet’s mind, squirming into his thoughts, making him remember things he shouldn’t, things too painful for words. Because Longshot is right, isn’t he?

Jet is what he is because of the Fire Nation. He’s been touched by them, deeply, so deeply he can’t even remember who he was before them. Changed. Twisted. Infected.

What if he’s the one who’s-

No.

“It doesn’t matter.” Jet hisses. Longshot’s expression doesn’t change. Jet clenches his teeth. What he’s done has had horrendous consequences, and he’d take it back if he could, but that doesn’t change this. “It _doesn’t._ I was still _right_. _I’m still right!_ ”

But there, stark in his memory is Katara, soft yes, but sold on the cause and willing to leave her home for the world’s last hope, staring at Jet like he’s the monster and spitting out the words _you’re sick_.

What if he is?

And Spirits, the magnitude of that thought, the idea that it wasn’t just the consequences of his attack on the village that made them wrong, but the _action itself_. The Water Tribe kids who had suffered at the hands of the Fire Nation had been horrified by him, his Freedom Fighters who had lost so much became horrified, but it was only what happened after that horrified Jet. His actions seemed right because the Fire Nation had done so much worse, over and over and over, and that was twisted, wasn’t it? Thinking you weren’t sick because you’d seen _sicker._

The blood on his blades suddenly seems like a very big mistake.

He looks back. He can see the Sandbender’s chest jerking as he tries to breathe, can hear his choked, panicked coughs. Bahn begins to whimper again.

They weren’t really that different, were they? Sick men in the desert willing to kill their countrymen to appease their greed and Jet willing to do the same to sooth his hate, his fear.

Because it wasn’t victory he’d been thinking about as he stood frozen to that tree, watching the judgment he’d made carried out. He wasn’t thinking about necessary sacrifices, or even the safety of his Freedom Fighters.

All he’d been thinking as he watching the arch of Longshot’s arrow as it fell towards the dam was _maybe now I can finally sleep the whole night through._ He’d just wanted to not be afraid anymore. Wanted it more than anything. And that in itself is a kind of greed, isn’t it?

…something about that thought…

Longshot’s arrow.

Longshot’s…

Oh.

 _Oh_.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” Jet breaks the silence, his anger suddenly gone. Bahn and the sandbender seem insignificant suddenly, and Longshot so important he fills up the world. “That’s why your arrow was off in Li’s village. It’s because that was the first time you heard my whistle for a hit since that day. That’s why you’re afraid of me, because it was my order to blow the dam, but _you’re_ the one who took the shot. Because you listened to me, like always, and everything fell to pieces, and you’re afraid it will happen again.”

Longshot is still as a statue, so still Jet can’t see him breathe. Something cold and yawning is opening in Jet’s chest, and it won’t close. “It isn’t your fault. It’s mine. Every bit of it is mine.”

Longshot shakes his head slowly, denying his absolution. Guilty because he hadn’t said no.

“You’ve never said no to me,” Jet points out. “Not until now. I never gave you the chance to learn how to. I never _wanted_ you to be able to say no. I _still_ don’t. You can’t blame yourself for being what _I made you into.”_

Spreading the disease.

 _Spirits,_ he’s going to throw up.

The world around them darkens as the last ray of light bleeds out of the sky. Neither of them look away. Longshot looks like he’s spent, done talking, done standing against him, but Jet can’t let this go. If Longshot’s been feeling even a fraction of what Jet has…

“If it means anything at all,” Jet offers, saying something true because Spirit’s know if he lied right now it would break them both, “I’ve never felt sorrier for anything in my life than I do right now for giving you that order. I know that’s worthless. I know there’s no forgiveness for what I’ve done to you. I’m sorry anyway.”

Longshot is still for another long moment before his lips twitch upward, a bone-tired but amused expression. “A start,” he says.

“Yeah,” Jet swallows. His hands are shaking. It makes his blades rattle. “That’s a start.”

Jet clears his throat, looks at Bahn. “We’re taking the beetle things, the leader, and as many provisions as we can. We’ll leave them the ostrich horse."

He watches the realization settle over Longshot’s shoulders; that he won, that he said no to Jet and the world didn’t end. Surprise and wonder breaks over his face, and Jet never means to hurt his kids, he really doesn’t, but it seems he has been in ways he didn’t even realize.

A start, huh?

Jet’s never been more aware of how very far he has left to go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Jet victimizes a mostly innocent man using terror and pain.
> 
> *non-graphic depictions of someone being shot with an arrow.
> 
> *non-graphic depiction of someone urinating due to fear.
> 
> *Jet's crazy. I think that deserves a warning.  
> \--  
> The playlists have been updated some, so if you guys want to check those out there'll be some new stuff. See you soon, hopefully!


	4. Handholds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zuko and Smellerbee survive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought this would be the last chapter of this installment but it didn't turn out that way, sorry. I'll try to get the last one out soon, but school's starting up again, so no promises.
> 
> Hope you guys enjoy!
> 
> Warnings in endnotes.

Zuko breathes out with the last ray of the sun, and opens his eyes. The sky is alight with a fading orange. The air is cooler than it was at the beginning of his meditation, but the sand is still warm to the touch. He looks at his companion, curled in a ball a few feet in front of him. Smellerbee’s face is to him, her knife held slackly in her hand. He’s been concentrating on her steady breathing, finding it easier to steady himself when focusing on her near silent puffs of air and tiny sleeping noises than when he's focused on the heat of the sun. Heat isn’t calming him like it should. It’s connected to too many dangerous things.

He reaches out towards the girl’s thin shoulder but hesitates, eyes on her knife. They may be allies when awake but it is unreasonable to expect their rapport to extend into sleep. Everyone is an enemy when your eyes are closed.

“Smellerbee,” he calls instead. “Wake up.”

Her nose wrinkles and she curls up tighter, but she doesn’t open her eyes.

Zuko sighs, and rubs at his wrists. They’re not nearly as painful as they were when Smellerbee finally managed to free them, but they are sore and they look horrible, the rings of dark bruising and shallow red nicks where Zuko had cut his hands while trying to sever the bonds stark against his sun-burned skin.

But he can feel his fingers again. That’s good.

He gently cups his hands around his mouth and tries to remember the bird call Jet would use when he was calling them together at the end of the day. His attempt is weak, shaky and off-key, but it’s recognizable.

Smellerbee’s eyes spring open instantly, locking onto Zuko. He freezes, the bird call cutting off, abruptly sure he’s crossed some unseen line. He can’t parse the expression on her face, but her hand doesn’t tighten around her weapon, so he can’t have messed up too badly.

He drops his hands to his sides, straightens his back. “It’s dark,” he says. His voice is scratchy and small. “We need to keep moving.”

Smellerbee sits up, rubs at her eyes with the back of a hand. She looks around them, eyes wide and sharp with calculation. Zuko stands, backs up so that he isn’t crowding her, and watches her watch the dunes surrounding them.

“How long was I out?” Smellerbee asks. She sounds younger than ever with sleep in her voice.

Zuko looks toward the dulling band of red on the horizon, calculates. “A little over an hour.”

“… And how long have you been awake?”

Zuko smooths out his expression. “Not that long.”

Smellerbee stands up, takes a step towards him and leans forward to study his face. Zuko looks away from her and tries to think of something else. Nothing comes to mind.

“Liar.” Smellerbee decides, smacking his shoulder. It isn’t a hard hit, either by design or because Smellerbee’s arms are still weak from sleep. “You’ve been awake the whole time, haven’t you?” Smellerbee frowns. “That’s not what we decided.”

“It’s safer when one of us is awake,” he grumbles mulishly.

Her eyebrows rise, but she doesn’t comment. “Let me see your wrists.”

Zuko considers declining, arguing that they don’t have time for anything nonessential. He doesn’t, mostly due to the half there thought that there’s something strange about Smellerbee when she’s checking injuries, and he’d like to see it again. He holds his arms out and lets her graze his hands and arms with her fingertips. She hums thoughtfully as she carefully rotates his wrists and presses gently on the bruises, watching his face for distress.

“You can feel them now?”

“Yes.”

And there it is, something in her eyes that makes Zuko look at where her fingers are cupping his abused skin and think _she’ll never squeeze._

He pulls away, feeling uncomfortable and not sure why. “We should go.” He looks at the sky above them. The constellations are different from the one visible on the ocean, the ones he’s used to navigating by, but if he squints at the horizon farthest from the hint of sun…

“This way,” he decides, and begins walking.

Smellerbee matches him. She looks better, the troubling glazed look gone from her eyes, the lurching stagger from her legs, and the slur from her words.

Walking at night is different than walking in the daylight. It’s cooler, of course, but also rife with a tense unease. The dune’s shadows are large heavy black things, and the desert life is definitely awake and on the prowl, the erratic sound of strange animal calls and the scuffle of movement somewhere nearby keeping Zuko and Smellerbee wary and alert.

It’s almost like meditation, the rhythm of their steps. The desert becomes something recursive and unending in Zuko’s mind, as if the sand has swallowed the rest of the earth while they’ve been walking, and there is nothing left to see but sand and dunes and night.

The sky is completely dark, their path only visible due to a small pale moon, when Zuko feels a change in the sand beneath his feet. He stops moving and shifts his center of balance to better distribute his weight, pulse jumping in alarm. “Smellerbee.”

She notices his unease and mimics his stance in a quick flicker of movement, knife flashing to a ready position. Zuko places his hands on his dao hilts and looks down.

There’s nothing drastically wrong, but the sand is the slightest shade darker, the grains looser, and his feet don’t sink as far when he carefully pushes down. He frowns and moves his foot to the side, carefully feeling for the edges of the inconsistency.

“Hey, Blue.”

He snaps his head up, eyes widening as he follow Smellerbee’s line of sight to the sand caving inward in a perfectly even line directly behind her feet.

Whatever this is, it’s manmade. And Smellerbee is standing right on top of it.

“Don’t move,” Zuko orders, circling her. There’s smaller lines becoming visible in the sand on either side of the girl, three sides of a square. “It’s a trapdoor.”

“Yeah, I figured.” Smellerbee is still, her voice tight and high.

Zuko stops behind her. “You’re closest to this side. You think you can step backwards over it?”

Smellerbee looks down, and the ground shifts an inch lower at the movement, making them both freeze with their hearts in their throats. Slowly Smellerbee shifts a foot backwards, readying herself to slide a foot over the line, but the ground compresses further with a lurch, forcing her to freeze and turning the line into a step.

Zuko reaches out, eyes stuck on the danger. “That won’t work. Give me your hand.”

It’s the wrong decision.

She reaches out, twisting her body to reach towards him, and the desert gives way beneath her. Zuko’s hand catches hers and the momentum pulls him forward towards the gaping square of dark swallowing her up. He falls to his knees with the force of a hit, but her hand is in his, grip tight-

The trap door swings back upwards as soon as her weight leaves it, slamming into his wrist.

With a crunch.

He howls wordlessly, sharp pain flashing white before his eyes. Hunches over, clutching at the tender flesh already throbbing at the offbeat with the white lightness in his head.

Then Smellerbee’s voice, a wordless exclamation muffled by the sand and closed trap door, and he realizes through a mind still thick with pain that he _let her go_.

Scramble at the sand, push at the now visible wooded door with hand that throbs at the contact, _Great Spirits_ it _hurts_.

Leap to his feet and shift into a basic fire bending stance, feet splayed and fist cocked, before he thinks better of it, as easy as breathing, easier than breathing because his breath is a harsh pant that burns coming out.

Stop.

Wooden target, leeching cold night, breath stuck in his lungs, thrumming hurt, her barely audible pants beneath his feet. Enemy, enemy, enemy, enemy. Allie.

Stop. Think.

He pushes the throbbing hurt out of his thoughts, the panic, the desperation, and crouches by the door. Zuko places all his weight on his left leg and presses against the door with his right. It’s a strain to move it, and he stops after gaining a few inches, letting the door swing closed again. He unsheathes his dao with his left hand (his right hand aches, hurts, burnsburnsburns) and slams them deep into the sand like they’re one blade, tests their resistance. Satisfied, he pushes the door down with his foot once more, in one lurching, brutal kick. He can make out a wooden incline peppered with sand in the soft moonlight. Zuko pushes farther, using his dao as an anchor to keep him from falling in, and sees the top of Smellerbee’s head a good three arms lengths below.

“Injuries?” He calls.

She glances up for just a moment, eyes wide and animal, before she’s looking forward again, clutching at the wooden incline at her back with one hand and holding her knife aloft with the other. “Minimal.”

“Can you climb up this?” he asks next, voice hushed by how obviously spooked she is, and the memory of Jet’s voice settles across his shoulders, the words _she doesn’t like to be closed in._

“Not backwards,” she answers, her voice hoarse like she’s been screaming for hours, or like she wants to, “and I need to keep my knife ready. I don’t think I’m alone down here.”

And Zuko can hear it now, the scuttle of movement echoing out of the hole, a menacing hiss. It buzzes in his veins like ice or lightning, locks him mind into a looping circle of _get her out, get her out, get her out._

If he doesn’t figure something out quick, he’ll burn her out, damn the consequences. She’s young and strong and wouldn’t leave him, and isn’t dying out here.

He scans the door for weaknesses, spots a width of leather attached to the door by a piece of wood and pegs. “I think I see the hinge,” He says, more to give Smellerbee something to listen to than any other reason. “I need to get over there and-”

Wait. If the door swings _up_ , it’s more likely a weight than a simple hinge, and to keep the door from swinging all the way to vertical there would need to be…

He checks on his side of gap and finds a wooden protrusion jutting out, short, but wide.

“I have an idea. Hold on.”

The hissing is getting louder. Smellerbee’s shoulders pull in, muscles impossibly tighter, but she nods, fast and frantic.

In a moment of inspiration Zuko slides one of his dao loose and sheaths it, and then takes off the sheath. He can probably only use one half of his weapon right now anyways. “Incoming on your left,” he says, and sends the sheath sliding down the incline. Smellerbee’s head jerks to the side and she grabs it as it slides past her, shifting her grip to the hilt and baring the blade. Her shoulders loosen with something larger than her knife in hand.

Zuko nods, satisfied, and bends to scrutinize the trap's wooden lip. He unearths his second dao and drives it into the wood in one overhanded swing, the crack echoing strangely through the dunes. He pushes it back, throwing his shoulder into it, and the lip comes loose, spinning down into the pit. Zuko makes a wordless sound of warning, but he can’t do more because he’s balances precariously between the earth and the trap door, quivering as he slams the sword back into the sand to keep from falling in after.

There’s the sound of wood hitting wood below him, a heavy _thump_ , a loud hiss, the sound of metal forced through flesh, a cry of pain.

Zuko pushes against the door, pulls against his dao, and rolls away. The door swings up fast as a squirrel-mouse trap, whipping past him with a whoosh of air.

Smellerbee is slumped in the corner closest to the opening, panting and staring upwards with uncomprehending eyes. Something long and large and black with scales, fangs, insect legs and a stinger lies twitching beside her, dying throws. Zuko’s dao stands erect, plunged into the temple of it’s reptilian head.

“Injuries?” He calls again.

Smellerbee’s mouth opens like she’s going to answer, but only a weak wheeze of air passes her lips before her eyes roll back in her head and she lags against the wall.

It’s fuzzy, how Zuko gets her out. It seems like one moment he’s staring down the hole, sick with horror, and the next he has her slumped over his back, feet aching and the muscles in his thighs and arms sore, like he strained them, his wrist throbbing. He walks. He walks and walks, and talks, silly words too insignificant to remember, hummed snatches of a lullaby his mother used to sing. There’s no answer, nothing but dead ( _dead dead dead_ ) weight and the familiar taste of failure on his tongue. But she’s breathing against his neck, heavily, laboriously, with terrifying pauses every couple of minutes, but she’s still breathing, so he keeps walking.

He hits the first person that touches him with his bad hand, and the pain almost sends him to his knees. He can only snarl at the second one, but they back up so it’s alright. The third one steps forward with his hands raised and Zuko tenses from head to toe, tries to raise fire to his fists because she’s lighter than two sacks of ostrich-horse feed and he just doesn’t _care_ anymore, but his breath is a thrashing beast being strangled by fear in his chest and there’s no fire in him to grab.

The third doesn’t move forward, just keeps making the same sounds over and over until Zuko realizes that they’re words.

“You’re safe now. We’ll help her,” he promises.

“If you hurt her I’ll kill you,” Zuko promises back.

\--

“She’s lucky,” the healer says. Smellerbee is tiny without her armor and laid out asleep on a mat, but her breath is even again and the flickering light of the healer’s lamp shows her cheeks to be neither red with a fevered flushed or deathly pale.

Zuko’s breathing is better too, and his mind clearer, now that she’s out of danger. He thought he’d feel shamed or uncomfortable with how much he lost his head, how close he came to blowing his cover and losing his life because he couldn’t keep himself from caring too much, but he can barely think about that past the relief that his mistake didn’t kill her, and the guilt that it almost did.

“If the scorpion-snake had gotten it’s fangs in her,” the healer continues, wiping the blade of the remarkably thin knife he’d used to open a wound on her leg to flush the poison out, “I wouldn’t have been able to help. But the stinger can be survived if you find a healer quick enough, and if you’re willing to fight for it.”

“She’s a fighter,” Zuko tells him.

The healer pats Zuko’s knee with an old and withered hand, the wrinkles by his eyes bunching up when he smiles. “You both are.”

“Thank you for saving her,” Zuko says as the man fiddles with the stiff tight binding holding Zuko’s wrist immobile, and if he could take his eyes from Smellerbee’s rising and falling chest for more than a moment he’d bow, low and long and respectful.

Smellerbee mumbles in her sleep, and the healer moves forward, letting his hand hover over her lips to check her breathing again. “She’s lucky,” he says again.

She is, but in the way Zuko is, where everything goes wrong but somehow it’s never quite enough to kill you. The kind of luck that no one wants, because it doesn’t mean _safe_ or _blessed_ or _wanted_ as much as it means _try harder,_ and _fight longer_ and _never give up_. It’s the luck of the people who fight a never ending battle for one more day, one more, and one more. Zuko never realized how many other people lived that way until after the North Pole.

Smellerbee won, this time.

They won.

It’s enough to let his shoulders lower, his eyes slip closed for a moment. There will be another fight tomorrow, for tomorrow. But this time, they won.

Voices rise outside the tent, and the flap is shoved aside. Zuko rises to his feet and moves to Smellerbee’s side in two quick steps. His head swims with the sudden movement, but he keeps his eyes fixed on the opening and his left hand tight on the grip of his swords.

“Don’t just burst in here, you’re startling my patients,” the healer starts, voice high and sharp, but then two men shuffle in with a groaning man suspended between them, and the reprimand putters off. The old man directs them to lay the man on the mat beside Smellerbee, and after giving Zuko a cautious and slightly aggressive stare (which he returns) the men follow the healer’s instructions.

He can’t see past their bodies for a moment, a good four people crowding around the second mat, but them the healer is sending them off with an irritated “I need _room_ ,” and they leave, giving Zuko a chance to look over the second patient.

Thin dark wood, red feather fletching. Zuko recognizes the arrows through the man’s shoulder and upper leg the moment he sees them.

Longshot’s.

Great Spirits, Smellerbee was right. Jet came for them.

Zuko grits his teeth, bewildered and angry, but somewhat ashamed because she had told him, hadn’t she? But not for one second did he believe that-

What kind of goat-pig brained- why-

They were almost out of this desert. They came back. How- what-

Who _does_ that?!

…Jet does. Apparently.

“Hold still,” the healer says, snapping the arrow shaft under the fletching with a quick flick of the wrist. Zuko is kneeling beside them before he realizes he’s decided to, helping to roll the injured man onto his side, holding him steady and still as he can while the healer pulls the arrow out, as quickly as he can without causing more damage. The injured man wails and tries to squirm away, but Zuko just grimaces and presses down harder.

“Mind the wrist, the bone's cracked,” the healer tells him as he presses cloth to the hole through the man’s shoulder, winding a strip of it around him and tying it to keep the compress in place. It takes Zuko a moment to realize he’s talking about Zuko’s injury, and not some ailment of the man groaning beneath him.

“It’s fine.”

The healer gives him a stern look and reaches for the second arrow, this one facing the other direction so that the feathered end is toward the old man and the blood slick point towards Zuko. “You’ve done this before,” the man says with steadfast conviction, and Zuko doesn’t deny it.

“A cloth?” Zuko asks. The man hands him one, and he uses it to wrap the small bit of shaft visible from his side of the wound, allowing him to get a better grip on it. He pulls back evenly, careful of the almost sucking way the bloody wound tries to hold onto the arrow, not letting it dictate the direction he is pulling.

“Good,” the healer says when it slides out with a slurping wet sound.

Air hits the back of Zuko’s neck and he jolts, turning to find a man holding the flap of the tent open, staring down at the injured man with something both blank and painful in his face. “Healer Loi. What has happened to my son?”

“Chief,” The healer says, and Zuko immediately amends his assessment of how important this man is, and what kind of danger he could pose. He carefully finishes helping the injured man lie down and scoots back, sitting still and straight, tense as much from old memory and the obvious authority in the way the man stands as from the fact that he can’t get between the chief and Smellerbee without drawing his attention.

“How did this happen?” The chief asks again, and then again to someone outside the sanctuary of the healer’s tent when the old man can’t answer him.

“He was attacked while trading with the Jiachong merchants,” Zuko hears through the thin animal skin walls.

There’s a pause, heavy and sharp. “We don’t trade with the Jiachog Merchants.”

“Your son was, Chief. One of them arrived with him, if you’d like to talk to him.”

“Be ready to bring me to him in a moment,” the chief orders as he swings back into the tent. Zuko carefully doesn’t move. The man pays him no attention, instead staring at his son, face twisted with disbelief and disappointment and disgust. Zuko recognizes that look.

“Blue,” Smellerbee slurs behind him, “Where are-”

Zuko reaches backwards, snagging her wrist and squeezing it in warning. She stops talking, but the damage is done.

The chief, the man in charge, is looking at him. He looks nothing like Zuko’s father, but the steel in his eyes and the downturn of his lips is the same. “Who is this?” the chief asks the healer, eyes locked to Zuko, who squares his chin and thinks _I’m the interesting one, the dangerous one. Look at me_.

“They got caught in one of the pit-traps. A hunting party brought them back, the little one was in bad shape. Scorpion-snake.”

Zuko grits his teeth when the chief’s eyes shift to the mat behind him, looking at Smellerbee. The fingers of his bad hand twitch, itching to wrap around his sword’s hilt.

“We’re thankful for your help,” Zuko says, relieved when it pulls the man’s attention back to him. The chief’s eyes glide to the left side of Zuko’s face, the scar, before skipping off, uncomfortable. Lots of people’s eyes do that.

“Refugees?” the chief asks. Zuko bows his head swiftly in acknowledgment.

The man looks down and something dark and sad comes over him. Zuko twitches, realizing he’s taking in his fresher wounds. “The Haumi tribe has been known to abduct refugees to harvest a honey for traders. Is that what happened?”

Zuko tries to make his muscles loosen and his face blank, but there’s a tightness around his eyes that won’t go away. _Oh, Zuzu,_ a memory says, _your face gives everything away_.

“We were brothers to the Haumi once, and I will not directly come against them because of this, but I do not agree with their actions,” the man says. It’s meant as comfort, and it makes Zuko scowl. “You’re safe here.”

His lip pulls up in a sneer before he can help it. “Safe? What world do you live in?”

It’s another mistake, and Zuko tenses to meet the repercussion, but the man just dips his head, conceding the point. “Did they take you to the traders? Did you see what my son was doing there?”

Zuko thinks for a moment, shakes his head. “I never saw anyone but our abductors, and the benders who attacked them. We ran, then.”

“Attacked the Haumi? Was it- do you know who did that?”

Zuko shakes his head again. “They bent the sand. Most of their faces were covered. Both sides looked the same to me.” He looks down at the man the healer is fussing over. “I don’t recognize your son.” That doesn’t mean he wasn’t there, and that knowledge hangs between them, obvious and unsaid.

The chief frowns, and when he looks at his heir his face is angry. “There are only two tribes in this part of the Si Wong. There are few other options. Thank you for your attention, Healer Lui. Send for me when he wakes up.”

He strides towards the door.

“What are you going to do to him?” Zuko asks.

The chief stops, turns halfway so he can meet Zuko’s eyes. “Do to him?”

“He disobeyed, didn’t he? That is why you’re angry.” Zuko looks down at the injured man. His face is flushed and his breathing shallow. Zuko wonders if he’d looked like that, in the days after his banishment. “You’re going to punish him.”

Smellerbee squeezes his hand like she knows there’s something wrong, and Zuko squeezes back, just to remember the relief he had felt when he realized she would be alright.

“Would you like for him to be punished?” the chief asks, tone careful and even. Danger.

Zuko stills himself, pushes the emotion out of his voice. “That’s not my concern. You’re his father. He disrespected you. Are you going to punish him?”

The man is still for a moment, thinking, before answering. “Yes.”

Zuko nods, and for once the world makes sense.

“I will tell the tribe of his actions and forbid him from leading the young men on the hunt anymore. He will earn that privilege back when he can prove to me that he has leaned why we do not let greed and pride dictate our actions.” He glances again at his son. “I believe this is a lesson he has already started learning.”

What? “That’s it?”

The chief’s face is hard now. “Do you expect me to _hurt_ him? To ostracize him from the tribe? We are not the barbarians the world takes us for. I do not condone unnecessary cruelty.”

Zuko says nothing, but he’s afraid the truth is on his face.

The man sighs. “He is my son,” he says, and there’s something more than anger in his voice, something that reminds Zuko of his mother’s hand on his shoulder. “I will not be soft in this; it is a great betrayal. But nothing he does could lessen my love for him. His pain comes from his own mistake. I will be the alleviation, not the cause of it. And I will not cast him from me.”

The chief leaves, and Smellerbee makes a soft inquiring sound, but Zuko can’t hear it over the thrumming in his ears. He can feel the sudden urgency in the way she yanks her wrist in his grip though, and it’s enough to make him turn to look at her, to pull his mind from the past.

She’s staring at the broken arrows beside the second mat and Zuko’s awareness of the healer heightens. He scrambles to find a way to warn her not to say anything about knowing the archer when Smellerbee’s eyes dart to the healer on their own and narrow. His shoulders loosen at her understanding of their situation, something uncomfortable and warm that makes him want to smile spreading in his chest.

Ugh.

“Water?” Smellerbee asks, her voice even scratchier than normal.

The Healer stands, patting Zuko again as he squeezes past him. “Of course, dear.”

Smellerbee looks at Zuko the moment the tent flap closes, mischief in her eyes and smirk on her face. “Do you think that will take very long?”

Zuko cocks his head, listening for footsteps. They’re hard to make out in the sand. “No.”

“Then you better hurry.”

Zuko lets go of her (why didn’t he do that earlier?) and turns to the injured man, nudging at his uninjured shoulder. “Wake up.”

The man’s eyelids flutter but do not open.

Smellerbee scoots closer, swings an arm out, slapping her flat palm to the compress on his shoulder. The man’s eyes spring open, his breath leaving him in a pained rush.

Zuko shoves her hand back, shocked. “Don’t do that!”

Smellerbee melts back into her mat, her eyes tired but unrepentant. “It woke him up.”

“He’s injured!” Zuko exclaims. “They weren’t cruel to us, we won’t be cruel back.”

Smellerbee lifts her eyebrows at him. “The world is at war. We don’t really have the choice of not being cruel.”

Zuko grits his teeth and does not budge. “Sometimes that’s true, but not this time. He isn’t your enemy.”

“I trust Longshot’s judgement,” Smellerbee says, looking again at the bloody pieces of arrow.

“What do you _want_?” the man pants.

Zuko scowls and turns to him. “The person who shot you. Did you see him?”

“Yes,” the man gasps.

“Was he okay?” Smellerbee asks, the same time Zuko demands “Where did he go?”

“The boy killer with the hooks swords,” the man says, and Smellerbee makes a sound between excitement and hurt. “Are you his?”

Smellerbee says, “Where _is_ he?”

“He cares about you. He cares a lot.” The man turns his head to look at her for the first time. His breath stutters and his eyes cloud with tears when they meet hers. “How _old_ are you, boy?”

Smellerbee’s eyes flash. “I’m not a boy, I’m-”

Zuko grabs her arm in a panic, hard enough to hurt. He doesn’t want them to know more about them than they must. The healer knows she’s a girl, but there’s a big difference between the _healer_ and the _son of the chief_ having that information, and Zuko had lived with sailors on a Fire Navy ship for three years. He’s heard stories about what happens to the woman soldiers who are taken as war prisoners in the Earth Kingdom.

“Where did they go?” he demands, pulling the man’s attention away from Smellerbee. She growls at him and pulls her arm from his grip. He lets her.

“They’re headed to the Hive,” the man says, eyes drifting away. “The Haumi have my men. They’re going to die.” He looks at Zuko, tears spilling over his cheeks. “I messed up. They’re going to die.”

Zuko swallows his sympathy. “Where is this Hive?”

The man smiles, glassy and fading. “Follow the buzzard-wasps.” His eyes slip back closed.

“Wake him back up,” Smellerbee demands.

Zuko glares at her. “No. We can find get that information from someone else. Can you walk?”

Smellerbee lifts her leg, thick with bandages and still swollen, grimacing. “I can manage.”

Zuko rolls his eyes. “You’d fall over if you stood up, wouldn’t you.”

Smellerbee sticks her tongue out at him, which Zuko ignores, mostly because he doesn’t know how else he’s supposed to react. He gathers the armor piled beside the bed, pulls himself to his feet and squats with his back to her. “I’ll carry you.”

“…are you offering me a sheep-piggy back ride?”

Zuko doesn’t know what that is, but it sounds uncomfortable. “Would you just get on?”

She does, slowly and mostly due to a determination birthed from the glee being carried on his back brings her for some reason. “Yah!” she orders when they’re finally standing, squeezing her legs against his sides like he’s her mount, not enough to hurt.

“Stop that,” Zuko orders, slapping at her good ankle with his bad hand. Not enough to hurt.

"Oh! Your wrist, how bad is it?"

"It's fine."

It’s then that the healer bows back in. They freeze, and he cocks a brow at them, disapproving. “Going somewhere?”

Zuko squares his shoulders and glares. It feels good to have one clear path before him again, only one possible decision. “There are people who need us. We’re leaving.”

“Both of you are injured, sunburned, and your bodies devoid of water, dangerously so.”

“We’re going.”

“I refuse to allow you to die from foolishness right after I saved your lives.”

“We’re going.”

“Won’t be moved then?” the man sighs. “What exemplary examples of our nations most celebrated and irritating temperament, you are. I’ll get my bag.”

It takes Zuko a moment to realize he’s just been called a _stereotypical Earth Kingdom citizen_ because he’s stubborn. By the time that sinks in the moment to react has passed. That’s probably a good thing.

He shakes his head, turns to watch the man tuck a roll of cloth bandages into a rather square “Your bag?”

The healer grins. “If my patients won’t stay to be treated, I’ll just have to come with them.” He swings the bag onto his shoulder. “Follow me.”

Zuko twists to look at Smellerbee, bemused.

She shrugs.

He follows.

A young man scrambles to his feet from where he was lounging against the healer’s tent when they emerge, eyes wide.

“Make yourself useful, apprentice,” the healer says jovially, pushing past the youth. “Keep an eye on our young Gashwin for me.”

“Yes, Healer Loi.”

The encampment is large, a good number of tents glowing orange against the black night, the silhouetted shadows of women and men and children cast upon the animal skin of their walls like the elaborate shadow puppet shows their mother would take them to when he and Azula were young.

The healer leads them to a clearing in the middle of the camp, where a good dozen men are hurrying around, readying four of the curious sand ships.

The Chief strides out of another tent, his face dark like thunder. “Six of the young men in my son’s hunting party have been lost to the Huami tribe.” There’s a murmur of discontent through the assembled men. “We will ride to the Hive, and get them back. This is a dark day for both the Zhuani and the Haumi. Let us ask the Spirits that no more blood than necessary will be spilled today. That said, we go prepared to fight.”

The assembled men rumble in agreement.

The chief’s eyes scan the crowd, eventually coming to rest on Zuko, Smellerbee, and the healer. “What is this?”

“Our guests have grown tired of our hospitality,” the healer explains. “and I thought I’d tag along to stem the flow of rampant stupidity.”

Zuko stands taller, feeling like he’s somehow been insulted, but the curious sensation of Smellerbee snickering into the back of his neck distracts him from retorting.

"Shouldn't you be with my son?"

"Li is with him, he'll be fine. I'm more worried about these two."

The chief’s eyes lock with Zuko’s. “This is not a place for children.”

Zuko lifts his chin. “If you count me as a child you would count our companions as children as well. And unlike your young men, we have no tribe to come to our rescue. Only each other.” This feeling of need, of responsibility, is it the reason Jet came back? Zuko doesn’t know. “You can either let us come with you, or I’ll just walk there myself. Those are your only choices.”

The Chief’s eyebrow lifts. “That’s a long walk.”

“I have long legs,” Zuko replies.

The chief’s lips twitch up, and Zuko’s shoulders relax. Finally, he’s done something right.

“We welcome you then,” the Chief eyes his men. “Let this young man’s honorable conduct remind us of our bond with our brethren, and what it means. Let’s head out.”

It takes a moment for Zuko to be able to move again, the chief’s words buzzing in his head, making his chest ache. Push it away, he tells himself. It doesn’t count if his father doesn’t give it.

“This way, boys,” a stranger calls to them. “You can ride on my sand-glider.”

Zuko squeezes Smellerbee's leg preemptively and she yelps and squirms off of his back. He lets her down, but grips her waist, to steady her. She scowls. “I’m not a-”

Zuko grabs her wrist again. “Not so _loud_.”

“I’m a girl,” Smellerbee hisses at him in frustration.

“ _I_ know that,” Zuko hisses back. “That doesn’t mean _they_ need to!”

“Why _not_?” Smellerbee asks, and Zuko is not explaining this to a child.

“It’s just safer that way. Stop asking questions.”

Smellerbee’s face clears after a moment. “ _Oh,”_ she says, her voice dropping from a rather violent whisper to a true hush. _“_ You _are_ a war-child, then. I’d wondered.”

Zuko’s hand tightens without his consent. “A _what_?”

“A Fire Nation bastard,” Smellerbee says, and the fact that there is absolutely no venom in the words doesn’t keep Zuko from flinching hard, letting her wrist go like the contact burns.

Smellerbee wobbles at the loss of support, but is able to steady herself. “It’s okay,” she whispers, reaching out towards him. He doesn’t reach back. “I just guessed, because you look kind of… it doesn’t matter. It’s not your fault. Or your mom’s.”

It takes a moment for Zuko to understand exactly what she’s getting at, that it isn’t that she’s figured him out, but that she’s assumed he’s the son of an Earth Kingdom woman and the Fire Nation soldier who had defiled her. He nearly chokes on the horror of it when he does, and the outrage. How could she think something like that? How can she talk about it like she’s heard of it before, like something that happens all the time? He dearly wants to defend his parents, himself, his country, but there are Earth people all around him and he _can’t_ , and besides, that isn’t even the thing most horrifying thing about this conversation. “How do you even _know_ about-” he cuts off, shakes his head in sickened denial.

Smellerbee shrugs. “My family has been a bunch of war orphans for years. Everyone had a story. These things came up.”

Zuko stares at her, the baby fat still evident on her face, the matter-of-fact look in her eye, the hand she’s still holding outstretched towards him. He screams _this is unforgivable_ in his head, and for the first time he doesn’t feel guilty for thinking it, afterwards.

“These are Earth Kingdom people, they wouldn’t do that. But… I’ll let them think I’m a boy, if that makes you feel safer,” she offers.

Zuko swallows. Such trust in her people. Such understanding of evil. Still a child. “No one here is going to hurt you,” he says, like Jet does, like he can make it so by saying it as true and hard as he can.

Smellerbee smiles, and shakes her fingers at him until he lets her grip his hand in hers. “Well, look at that,” she says, pulling him with her as she limps after the stranger who’s standing beside a sand glider, waiting for them. “You might be getting the hang of this friend stuff after all.”

\--

It feels like an insult, how quickly the sand glider skims over the desert Zuko spent all day walking over. By the time a pale pink covers the horizon, a soft hint of the coming sun, they can see their destination.

“It looks like a grave stone,” Smellerbee says.

A grave stone. Such a funny idea. It must be a marker of some kind erected over the ground the body is buried in, instead of a shrine to hold ashes. If Zuko has seen one before, he doesn’t remember it. If it’s anything like the monstrous thing before him, he should have.

The shape grows as they near it, and Zuko focuses on the figures standing at the bottom of the huge rock. A horn sounds behind him and the two sand benders powering the craft Smellerbee and Zuko are riding on change the pattern of their movements, sending the sand glider swinging to the left.

They come to a stop, the Zhauni crafts forming a semi-circle around the Hive and the people in its shadow.

“Haumi tribe,” the chief calls out, his scratchy voice loud and arresting. “We have come for our sons!”

No one moves. No one speaks.

There’s something wrong, Zuko realizes. The surrounded Haumi don’t move to fight, or even turn towards the approaching Zhauni. They don’t move at all, nothing but a few turned heads and darting eyes, stiff like they are carved of stone, facing the Hive with their chins raised.

Zuko follows the direction of their gaze just as the sun breaks free of the horizon, and Zuko’s never seen anything like it, nothing as beautiful and terrible. The hive is huge, taking up a third of the sky, and black against the orange light of dawn. There are at least fifteen fires set in the round entrances carved into it, feeding smoke into the structure. The flames blink at him like a score of tiny eyes.

And there, at the very top of the huge block of stone, stands an archer with a straw hat on his head and a drawn bow in his hand, arrow aiming at something crumbled before his feet.

“Longshot,” Smellerbee whispers, like she wants to yell but can’t find the air to.

“What is going on?” the man beside him murmurs.

Zuko hops from the craft, reaching back up to help Smellerbee down.

“Stay here,” he tells her.

“Fat chance,” she answers, hobbling after him until the healer yells at her to keep the weight off her injury, foolish child, and Zuko is forced to return to her side and help before she topples over.

They approach the Chief, whose men tense in a way they hadn’t at his introduction, made wary by the eerie atmosphere. “I need to get to the top of that thing,” Zuko tells him.

The chief looks his way and Zuko locks his legs and glares, daring him to try and change his mind.

“I assume,” he says, “one of your companions is an _archer_.”

“Your son is a thief,” Zuko retorts, hard and angry. “If not a killer. I will not apologize for a boy I have only seen use his skill in the defense of others.”

The chief is still, unmoved. “Such trust you have.”

Zuko snarls. “It isn’t trust. Only a truth. Here’s _another_ truth. If anyone but us attempts to climb the Hive, he’ll carry through with whatever threat has the Haumi petrified. You have to let me up there if you want this resolved peacefully.”

“And what is keeping you from telling him to go through with his threat?” the chief questions. "You have no true reason to offer any of us good will."

Zuko grits his teeth. “Nothing. You’ll just have to trust that I won’t,” he replies. “We are not your enemy.”

The Chief scoffs. “And you want me to trust your word on this? Trust my men’s lives to it?”

Zuko breaths in, calms the shaking thing in his ribcage. He may not have enough for his father, but he has enough for this. “Not my word. Trust my honor.”

They stare at each other, each as still as the Haumi below them.

“Let them go to their friend,” the chief sighs, and something in Zuko breaks. And mends.

\--

Smellerbee refuses to stay at the bottom with the Healer because she is _ridiculous_ , so the assent of the rock face takes longer than it could have, and consists of a lot of Zuko carrying the girl and Smellerbee issuing less than helpful directions.

It’s worth it for Longshot’s face when they pull themselves onto the rock’s flat top, the way his eyes light up when he sees Smellerbee.

“Longshot,” she cries in glee. “Miss me?”

He nods, solemn, and then smiles, large enough to show his teeth. Zuko hears Smellerbee’s breath catch in her throat beside him.

“Where’s Jet?” Zuko asks. There’s a man at Longshot’s feet, dressed in nice clothing and bound. Leverage, of some kind.

Longshot’s lips thin out, and he nods down at the rock beneath them.

“He’s _in_ this thing?!” Smellerbee yelps.

“Of course he is,” Zuko answers, numb. “It’s where he thinks we are.”

And if Smellerbee hadn’t been hurt, if they hadn’t been found, if they hadn’t made the Zhauni bring them, Jet would have kept going, searching and searching until he was so lost he couldn’t find his way back out. Because it was an Earth thing as well as a Zuko thing, never giving up.

“I’ll go in after him,” Zuko says. He turns to Smellerbee. “You’re. Staying. Here,” Zuko tells her, his voice firm as… as rock, damn it.

“Okay,” she answers.

“…Okay?”

She shrugs. “Okay. I hate small cramped places. I’d go anyway if I wasn’t injured, but I won't be much help like this. So I’ll stay here and watch Longshot’s back, and you go watch Jet’s. Four is a good number.”

Zuko stares, dumbstruck.

“Be safe,” she says, and Longshot nods at him.

“I’ll bring him back,” Zuko promises. Smellerbee nods, and it should be enough, but... “I’ll come back too,” he offers, and that makes her eyes soften and her smile show, briefly.

Longshot describes which circular entrance Jet had gone into with a series of twitches and gestures while never changing the aim of his bow, which Smellerbee translates, and Zuko rips a strip off of the bottom of his tunic as a preemptive measure against the smoke, tying it around his lower face before climbing back down the mountain face, following the directions. The opening is marked with two intersecting lines, sword slashes against the stone. Zuko breaths in a last breath of fresh air and bares his blades.

He steps over the fire and walks into the smoke, and the darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *non-graphic references to rape (talk of war children)
> 
> *graphic description of an arrow wound
> 
> *cliff hanger


	5. Names

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jet fights, and embraces, the dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for all those who've given me such wonderful support on this. This chapter, story, and series are all dedicated to you, wonderful readers. I only hope I can live up to what you see in my writing.
> 
> Trigger warnings in end notes.

“Stay still.”

Jet whispers it, quiet and low. He’s listening as hard as he can, feeling the air move, inhaling the smell of smoke through the cloth tied around his face. Tasting dirt.

Seeing nothing.

He breathes, finds a steady sure place within him and speaks through it, letting it push his tone into what he needs and drown out what he feels. “Okay, here we go. Just a little farther. You doing okay, Shi?”

He doesn’t hear anything from his quiet shadow, but he feels a shift behind him, knows Shi is leaning forward without knowing which sense is telling him so. Jet moves back, just a little, loosening his shoulders, just in case the kid can sense him too. “You’re okay. You are. Let’s keep going.”

The black makes it hard to move. It presses so close to him, into him, from every direction, blinding his eyes and bleeding into the mind. It should be a solid thing. Everything in him expects it to be, and every step is disquieting, a song on a Pipa with off strings. Jet itches to reach for Shi’s hand, make sure he stays near. Make sure the dark doesn’t swallow him down. He can’t; he’d tried once and Shi had ducked away from him, had stayed silent and still for so long Jet feared he’d chosen the darkness over Jet’s quiet promise that he’d lead him back to the sun.

There’s a noise. Jet stops moving, drops low, can barely hear the whisper of Shi doing the same.

This is the third time he’s heard this sound, the sick squelchy tearing of flesh that means a buzzard-wasp is feeding on something dead. Someone dead. Not much of a someone anymore.

It’s far away, just the suggestion of an echo. But it’s in their way.

“Stay here. I’ll be back,” Jet whispers, and then “everything is going to be okay,” just to say it. And then he moves.

The noise becomes more distinct as he closes in. He holds his blades, caked with wax and blood just like his skin (has it seeped in yet, are his veins still red rivers under his skin or are they slow sticky trails of wax now) ready in his hands. Flesh tears. A beak snaps, echoes. Jet grows quieter as he grows closer.

He slides a foot forward, focusing on the stuttered rasp of his boot against the bottom of the tunnel. The sound of dripping blood presses silence into his feet, a greater grip into his hands.

His eyes are useless, and his ears won’t tell him what he wants to know. The dark is close, closer than anything, and he hates it.

Jet leans forward, shifting his weight onto his outstretched foot as carefully as his weary muscles allow. His left blade hits the wall, a dull tap that vibrates through his ears and stiff fingers, stopping his movement, grabbing his heart, sinking it from his chest. The sound of the buzzard-wasp stops, and Jet tenses. If the damn thing comes to him instead, he’ll still kill it (he has to, _must¸_ because Shi is behind him), but it will be harder. Take longer. His hook swords have never needed much from him to keep doing their jobs, but they need space to swing. And there’s no space here. The further in he goes, the smaller the tunnels get.

The buzzing starts up again, no closer, no angrier.

Its dismissed him. Good.

 Jet pulls his body closer into itself and ducks his head. Leans heavier on his front foot until it holds all of his weight.

Pulls his back foot forward, steady, steady.

Steps forward.

Starts again.

His legs are aching with strain by the time he’s close enough. He can hear the Buzzard-Wasp’s throat working, so near he can almost feel the sound against his skin. He lifts his head a bit, unable to stop looking for what he can’t see, and swings as wide as he dares, swift and hard and sure.

Resistance, a garble, the splash of blood hitting the floor, the thump of the body. He darts back from the bucking body, the stuttering wings. The sounds echo through the tunnels, _thump, thump, thump,_ and he stands hard and ready, blades before him, until it’s silent.

“Don’t come yet,” he calls out. He doesn’t want Shi here for this. It doesn’t matter if he makes noise now, any buzzard-wasps that could be attracted by his voice are already following the sound of death-throws, and will care more about the carcasses than him. Jet’s feet, no longer careful, echo into the blackness and he steps up to his kill and bends to skim his fingers over the smooth warm body, up to the soft feathers at the base of the neck. His hand follows the curve downward, and meets cloth.

He shouldn’t pause, but he does. He has to swallow once, twice, before he can push himself back into motion. He can feel Shi behind him, but he isn’t sure if it’s really him or just the black putting shape to Jet’s fears. His fingers follow the cloth up a leg, past a hip, around a wet warm open stomach (don’t think about it, don’t wonder, don’t _choke_ ) and up a flat chest. He shifts forward and finds a shoulder.

Male. Tall. His chest feels like it’s loosening and tightening at the same time, stretched between relief and dread.

He moves his hand to find a harshly jutting clavicle. A cooling neck. A sharp jaw.

He’s breathing hard, he realizes. It echoes around him. Shi can probably hear it. Jet shuts it down, pushes it back. The air sits smoke-heavy in his lungs, and he can slow his breathing, but he can’t stop the shake in it. His stomach is clenching. He doesn’t want… he doesn’t want…

He skips over the face to the hair, but while it’s short he can’t remember how short Blue’s is, and he’s never felt its thickness. He can’t tell. He wants… he wants to be able to tell before he touches the face. It feels like such a nasty thing, to recognize Blue, for the last time, only by what the Fire Nation did to him. He doesn’t ever want that brand to mean _dead_ instead of _survivor._

But he can’t tell another way.

So he steels his will, gives up his hesitation, and slips his hand down to cup the corpse’s left cheek. He finds cold, dead, smooth skin. No scar.

It’s not Blue.

His breath leaves in a wounded _whoosh,_ relief too huge for his lungs and his heart and his head. He doesn’t know if his eyes are open or closed. He falls back on his heels and lets his chin drop against his chest, not quite willing to stand up straight yet.

No one can tell in the dark, anyways.

\--

“We’ll have to crawl soon.”

There’s dread in Jet’s voice, and he curses himself for it. He wants to see Shi’s face, to hear him speak, or gasp, or cry, but fear has locked all the boy’s noise inside of him, and necessity keeps Jet from pulling them out again. He can do that when they’re out of this place, when they have Blue, and Smellerbee, and Longshot, when the world is no longer crumbling under the weight of _what if they’re already dead_.

Jet grits his teeth and presses his blade to stone, chipping into the rock to mark their passage. He isn’t going to be able to carry them, soon.

Shi will be able to carry them longer. He’s smaller. “Kid, I need you to carry my swords for me. Just until the tunnel gets wide again, okay? Do you have a sash or something, to tie them to do your back?”

Silence.

“Okay,” Jet sighs. “I’m going to lean them against the wall, and I want you to pick them up, carefully, and strap them on. No touching, okay? If you need something to tie with, tap the wall once. If you need help tying, tap twice. Tap three times when you’re ready to go.”

Silence, again. Jet waits. He hears the slide of metal as Shi takes the hook swords, the rustle of cloth. After a while, three taps on the tunnel wall.

 “Good.” Jet pulls the thick knife he uses for skinning animals from the hidden sheath at his side, and the cloth off his face. The air tastes like smoke. Clenching the blade between his teeth Jet stoops, and moves forward.

Shi follows. It takes longer for the tunnel to force him onto hands and knees than it does Jet, and longer to press into his shoulders and dig at his back and sides. Shi’s breathing sings of terror before Jet’s does though, and the hook swords rattle with how hard he’s shaking. Jet wants to talk to him, to sooth him back into quiet, but if he lets the blade fall from his teeth he’s not sure he’ll find it again.

Shi sounds like Smellerbee. Like Smellerbee when she was younger, smaller, still sharp, but more broken glass than ready blades. Jet hums comfort around the steel in his mouth.

And then he reaches out, and finds air where he expected more rock.

He lurches forward, grunting in alarm. dropping to his stomach and pressing his feet out, hard against the tunnel walls, stops his momentum. He hangs, his head and chest loose in moving air, his chest flat against rock, and his head rushing with blood.

Breathe. In. Out. He squirms back, until both hands are on solid rock, until he can push himself backwards. It’s harder than he expected, his own weight pressing forward into his aching forearms. They’re headed downhill, he realizes. Squeezed tight in the dark Jet hadn’t even noticed. He could have just- if he’d fallen, Blue and Smellerbee would be- _Longshot_ would-

Jet curses. Forcefully. The knife nicks the side of his mouth.

He _can’t_ make mistakes like this.

Breathe. No, not slow enough, not good enough, breathe again. Find a clear head, grab for cold and strong, _stop messing up._

Think.

 _Think_.

Okay. He doesn’t know how far the drop is. He doesn’t know if there’s Buzzard-Wasps below him, above him. He doesn’t know if him and Shi would survive if he falls.

He could push backwards, take them away from this danger. He could follow his own trail back to light, clean air, to _Longshot_. He could save Shi. He could take him back to the desert and then out of it, keep him with them, save him, _keep_ saving him, until he’s hard arms and legs and eyes, and can do it himself.

But Smellerbee isn’t anywhere behind him. Blue isn’t.

They’re somewhere ahead.

Smellerbee could be curled in the next tunnel, doubled in on herself while bad memories stealing her breath. She could be hurt. Alone. She could be _waiting for him._ Waiting forever, waiting until she doubts, until she dies. Or maybe she’d never doubt. That would be so much worse.

Blue could be right here, right below him, blades and face drawn, fighting the lack of light, and energy, and rest, the fears that stalk the black. He’s so thin, so worn and old inside. He’d been so bad off he was gaining weight on _refugee_ _rations._ He’ll starve in this place. He’ll fight it. It might take weeks. 

If Jet goes back, he’ll save Longshot. And Shi. Two of four. If he moves forward, he might save them all. Or, if he can’t find them, or dies in the fall, he’ll save no one, leave Blue and Smellerbee to die in the nightmare, and leave Longshot pay the price for following Jet’s orders, _again_.

Decide. He has to decide. He’s the leader. _He’s_ the leader. He’s _their_ leader.

Shi shifts behind him, uneasy.

(Nothing can ever press Jet forward like someone behind him, following.)

Jet shifts his arm, manages to get his hand around the hilt of the knife in his mouth. He pulls it out and grips it before him. He licks the blood from the cut on the side of his mouth, and realizes how very thirsty he is.

(It tastes like blood. It isn’t wax.)

Jet makes himself smile, so Shi will hear it in his voice. “Okay kid, here’s how it is. There’s a drop off in front of us. My friends could be there. So I’m going to try climbing down it.”

No movement, but Jet can nearly smell Shi’s fear.

“You’re going to be fine,” Jet says, commands. “If I don’t call back up when I reach the bottom, or I fall and don’t get up, or it feels like it’s been as long as it was before I found you, I need you to go back, and get out of here yourself.”

The silence tightens.

“It’s okay. It’s okay kid.” Now say something true. “You heard me making marks on the walls, right? If it’s a tunnel I went down and then came back out of, there will be two marks across each other. If there’s only one mark I haven’t backtracked. If you only use tunnels with one mark, and never use a tunnel with two or no marks, you’ll make it back outside. Tap the wall if you understand.”

Nothing for a long moment. Than a tap.  

“Good. Good boy. Smart kid.” Jet breathes in, out. “Take my hook swords. Use them if you have to. Make it out. There’s a guy with a bow and a hat, dark eyes. He’ll take care of you. He doesn’t talk much. Like you.” Jet smiles, humorlessly. “But he’s-” no, his voice can’t crack, Jet can’t _let_ it. “He’s the best kind of person. Tell him-” _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, for everything, I’m-_ “I said you’re supposed to stay with him. When you can. Tap if you understand.”

A tap.

“All right, then.” Jet licks his lips. Swallows more blood.

The hardest part is getting himself turned around enough that he can start climbing feet first. It takes some wiggling, cursing, and a very bad idea that leaves him swinging from one hand and his knife clattering down into the black.

At least Jet knows about how far the drop is, now.

It’s far. Not dead-on-impact far, but break-a-leg far, sure. Which in this place would mean dead, sooner rather than later.

His fingers ache. The hand and foot holds are shallow and harrowing. He curls himself into the rock he’s clinging to and makes himself move.

One hold. Another. Another. A slip, recover. Breathe. Another hold.

He’s been climbing a while when his foot hits something thick and straight, and wide enough he can stand on it.

Jet prods carefully. It gives under the pressure, just a bit. “Wax,” he says, his voice sounding flat against the rock and full behind him, like it’s coming from somewhere other than his mouth. It’s wax. The ledge, not his foot. He moves his other leg down, knee scraping against the wall, until his toes hit the same shelf. Then his left hand, inching down, sore fingers skinning rough stone until he finds a crack. Then, as soon as that hand is anchored solidly, his right hand follows, down, down, until it settles on the shelf between his legs.

Steady.

Ready.

He grips hard with his right hand, pulls his left hand out, his feet off, falls-

He hits another shelf with his feet, like he had hoped. The same width, the same waxy give, a third of his body length down.

Jet runs his free hand over the top shelf, finds where it dips in another straight-line angling away, then meets another, angled back to join the shelf under his feet. He grins. This shape is familiar. He’s seen it smaller, in bee-fly hives carried to him by little enthusiastic foragers covered in itching red stings and smugness.

He’s found the hive-nest. He’s found the _honey_.

He’s where Blue and Smellerbee should be.

He’s going to _find_ them.

He throws his head back and yells. “Shi! Everything’s going to be fine!”

And it is. It _is_.

And then there’s buzzing.

Many, harried, _close_ , angry, and not smoke-slow like those nearer the entrance. They dart upwards, past him. A wing skims his back. Jet jerks, ducks low and presses forward ungently, tearing through a thin wall of wax and scrambling into the space he’s exposed, until he finds the back with questing hands. There’s something squirmy and _squishy_ against his legs. He scoops it up, careful, _quick_ and twists, throwing himself down on his side, curled up, pulling the slimy mess in his hands as far over him as he can. It covers about half of him.

Something lands beside his feet.

He can hear it, he can hear it so well he’s almost seeing, the agitated buzzard-wasp as his paces in frantic loops over him, legs brushing his and feelers darting hurriedly over the egg, larvae, _thing_ he’s hiding under as it wiggles on top of him. The buzz is loud, demanding, and it sinks into his ears and vibrates down his spine.

It takes a long time for the buzzard-wasp to leave, and longer for the larvae to still. Longer for the noise outside to lose its frantic pitch, to dip down into steady silence.

Jet needs to _stop making mistakes_.

He has to forget about Shi.

His stomach is flipping and his hands are shaking when he squirms out from under his… companion. He doesn’t try to stop it. He doesn't have to, there’s no one here to _see_.

It takes him a while to find steady again.

He’s silent as he climbs down, and he stays that way when his feet hit earth, as he picks his way across the floor. There are buzzard-wasps near, he can hear their wings shifting, but they don’t sense him. He crouches, with no weapons and no luck to spare, and keeps it that way.

He follows his ears and the feel of the air moving on his face. Something brushes against his sleeve. He jerks back, but it follows, catches his wrist, and _shushes him_.

It’s a hand. On his wrist. A _hand._

It tugs and Jet follows, mind violently hopeful. It feels. It feels like so long since he’s been touched. It almost hurts. Jet _hates_ being alone.

They weave away from buzzard-wasps, then sharply to the side like they’re turning a corner, and then Jet’s _accosted_ , hands suddenly there, brushing his shoulders, back, face, hushed voices asking after _bites_ , _stings, injuries_ , multiple people breathing in staggered rhythms.

“Smellerbee,” Jet croaks, when it stops being too much to bear. The whispering ends. “Smellerbee, Blue, it’s Jet. Answer me."

Silence.

The whispering picks up again, _do you know, do you know_ , and Jet holds himself up and doesn’t crack.

The whispers come back, gentle negatives.

Okay. _Okay._ There’s other tunnels. There might be other hive-nests, he just has to. To keep trying.

“Did you leave anyone behind?”

Silence again. Then a hand digging into his shoulder, lips against his ear, the promise that “if you help us, we’ll show you.”

\--

There’s fourteen buckets between the eleven refugees. Jet fills three, stalking past the wasps and climbing up the hive, filling the bucket with honey, sneaking back. Three others are doing the same thing, the quietest, fittest, fastest. One of them finds his knife, presses it into his hand, and Jet fills their next bucket for them, in thanks. Every trip is slow, and careful, and terrifying. Having the knife again helps.

He’s just stepping out of the circle of refugees when he hears it.

A whistle. One of _his whistles_.

He can’t tell where it comes from. It bounces across the walls, sends the buzzard-wasps buzzing, circling. Jet darts back to the refugees and forces the bucket he’s holding into the nearest pair of hands. “Run!” he yells, because the sound is filling the place with danger, and he _cannot_ leave the call unanswered. “I’ll hold them off!”

They rush and Jet follows at their tail to the wider entrance they’d described to him. When he reaches it he turns, puts his back to the fleeing refugees, his face to the buzz, and whistles back. Loud, shrill, sure.

_Find me._

_I’m right here._

_I came for you._

_Come_ find _me!_

The first buzzard-wasp dives to his right, and he swings his knife at it hard, feels warm blood hit his hand and hears the creature crash into the wall. The second comes right to him, and Jet’s thrusts the knife forward to bring it to the ground, twice to make it stay, thrice to make it still.

The third smacks into his side and he rolls with it, finds its neck with one hand, cuts through its throat with the other, and rolls back to his feet. There’s blood on his face, in his eyes, so he closes them, keeps going. The fourth blends into the fifth and the sixth and the _tenth_ and-

They can’t get past. He has to, he has to keep them away from-

Shi is behind him. Jet straightens, bares his teeth, shuffles back, braces his feet. They won’t get past him. The refugees are there. Shi is there.

The twelfth is on him, is down, and the thirteenth he kicks away, and the fourteenth-

The fourteenth is shrieking in pain.

From someone else’s strike.

“Go!”

Jet obeys, turns, ducks, and runs.

The buzzard-wasps don’t follow. Maybe they can’t find the tunnel, or maybe their dead distracted, eating their own dead. Jet keeps going until he’s pressing through bodies, touching shoulders and heads and hands. “Keep going, keep going!”

They do. They aren’t quiet, but they aren’t caught, and then there’s red burning in Jet's eyes.

It’s light, he realizes, as those around him cry out, their steps stuttering to stillness. Light through his closed eyelids, through sticky blood. A hand catches his shoulder, turns him around.

 “You look _awful_.”

He opens his eyes then, squinting through the blood and daylight, his insides raw with hope.

It’s Blue.

It’s Blue with his hand on his shoulder. His face is bruised and his lip cut. It’s him, scarred and bright eyed and frowning, and-

“Where’s Smellerbee?”

“Out of here,” Blue informs him. “She’s with Longshot.”

She’s out. She’s not here, anymore. They’re all alive. Jet breathes, and it feels like the first breath he’s had in days.

“I found these, leaning against the wall,” Blue says, and holds something out.

Jet blinks down at his hook swords. Takes them. Inspects the cloth, knotted into a shoddy makeshift rope, tied around the hilts and dragging on the floor. Glances at the end of Blue’s outer garment, now notably shorter and more ragged than before.

“I pulled them behind me.” Blue says, his voice clipped.

Jet stares. Grins. “Smart.”

Blue smirks back, just a bit, mostly with his eyes. “So were the gouges. On the walls.”

Jet grins harder, then lets it fade. He looks around at the refugees. Some of them aren’t refugees but men of the desert, clothed in hanging tan cloth. It doesn’t seem to matter, they crowd and dither the same as the rest of them, eyes on the light, desperate and fearful.

Someone’s missing. Jet turns back to Blue ( _alive_ ). “Where’s Shi?”

Blue blinks. “Shi?”

“Yeah, little guy, he…”

… he was behind him, at the bottom. When Jet had left him in the small tunnel, at the top.

He’d never spoken. Never touched him.

Jet had just known he was there.

Like he’d just known his name.

The hook swords were left leaning against the wall where Jet had left them because no one else had been there. Jet had put them there, and only thought they had been picked up again.

Shi wasn’t real.

“Jet.”

“It’s nothing,” Jet says. He pushes until whatever is on his face isn’t anymore. “Never mind.”

Blue squints at him. Unconvinced. _Worried._

 Jet shakes his head. “It’s just the dark. It messes with your mind.”

Shi wasn’t real.

Of _course_ , he wasn’t.

His name was _Shi._

(Nothing can ever press Jet forward like someone behind him, following.)

\---

There’s more desert tribesmen now than those frozen by Jet’s threat of Longshot’s arrow. Another group, ringing the original, weapons drawn.

Just grits his teeth. “ _Damn!_ ”

“It’s fine, they’re our allies.”

Jet sends Blue a glance, eyebrow raised. “Your contribution?” he asks, voice more amused than he is.

“They’re our way out,” Blue murmurs. His face is pinched and focused and mostly injuries, and Jet can’t wait until it’s safe and night falls and he can just watch his kids be alive for a while, so he can stop expecting Blue to disappear when he looks away. Like-

(Don’t think. It was just the dark.)

The desert people move out of the tunnels first, stepping over dying embers. They beckon the refugees to follow them, and the refugees do. Jet watches how they keep the refugees between them as they walk through the first group, still except for narrowed eyes and curling lips, to the second. They’re protective, and trusted, and he gets it. You can dislike someone all you want, but you don’t forget after the battle that they stood at your back. It’s not like they knew who was who in the hive. Everyone’s the same in the dark.

Blue follows the odd procession, blades ready in his hands, and Jet follows him. The first group is weaponless, he notes. Some are bound. The sand-benders, probably. Helpless.

He’s lead into the second group, to the feet of a man with narrow eyes and a strong bearing. Blue’s shoulders straighten when the man looks at him, and Jet does the same, waiting for an attack.

“We want out of this desert.” Blue demands.

The man stares. Looks at the sand people who escaped the hive, the refugees they’re clinging to, who are clinging to them. Looks back at Blue.

Bows his head once, in acceptance.

Things move quickly after that. Jet whistles the all clear, and the whistle he gets back, strong and eager, settles him down to his bones.

The man who respects Blue sends a group to the top of the hive. Jet stands shoulder to shoulder with the scarred boy and watches them climb up, then back down, then weave through their captors, turned prisoners.

Smellerbee’s on Longshot’s back, and when she sees him she wiggles down and limps over, throws her arms around his middle. Her arms cut hard into his sides, and he hugs her back.

“Are you okay?” Jet asks, burying his nose in her hair. She’s alive. She’s _real_.

Smellerbee steps back and grins. “Fine. Blue had my back.”

Jet glances at the boy in question, but he’s turned away, shoulders stiff. “Blue.”

“That isn’t my name.”

“ _Thank_ you.”

That gains his attention, pulls those light eyes back to Jet. “You’re the one who came back first.”

“ _First_?”

“We weren’t in the hive,” Smellerbee explains into his shirt. “Got away before that.”

Oh. Oh, thank the _Spirits_. No matter how it feels, knowing all of this was for nothing, that everything Jet did was useless. That he only put them in more danger because they came back for him, that he could have looked until he died and never found them, if they hadn’t. He’s so glad she was never in there. With what it was like for him, he can’t even _imagine_ how bad it would have been for her.

 Blue shifts on his feet. “Jet. I’m.” he squares his shoulders and bows low enough Jet can see the back of his head. “Thank you. For coming back for us.”

Jet grins, humorlessly. “I wasn’t the one doing the saving in the end.”

“Stop.” Blue orders, suddenly straight and scowling. “You don’t _get_ it. You. You didn’t.” he breathes out hard, frustrated. “Most people wouldn’t have come back. Most leaders. You did. That’s worth something. The rest doesn’t matter.” Then he turns and stalks away.

And somehow, it’s only then that it clicks. “He whistled for me.” Jet looks down at the top of Smellerbee’s head, bewildered. “He _whistled_ for me. In a hive of buzzard-wasps. Who are attracted to sound.  In the buzzard-wasp _hive-nest_. The absolute _maniac._ ”

Smellerbee nods against him. “I know, he’s ridiculous, we’re keeping him.”

Jet pats the top of her head. “You’re getting blood on you,” he comments. "And dirt. Wax. Larva slime."

“Ask me if I _care_.”

\--

Blue’s deal with the stern man gets them a ride on a sand glider. The rest of the refugees stay, and the man promises Blue that he’ll see them safely out of the desert when they're well enough to travel. Blue believes him. Jet, with Longshot against his back Smellerbee tucked into his side, Blue in his sights, and their enemy captured just doesn’t _care_.

They make good time; them, the two sand-benders steering the craft, and the fussy healer who insisted on coming along. By dusk, they can see trees. They’re nearly too far away to make out, a tiny ring of dark on the horizon eating the setting sun. The glider stops, no words shared but its riders one in heart, and they watch it. Blue steps off the glider and walks ahead a bit, then stops, just looking. He's a striking silhouette, bare headed, hand on hilt, straight backed. Longshot shifts a sleeping Smellerbee to lean on him and not Jet, and with an appreciative tap to Longshot’s shoulder Jet takes the hint, and follows Blue.

It’s the first time Jet’s approached on Blue’s bad side, the side with the scar. It’s also the first time Blue hasn’t darted assessing eyes to him, or suppressed a flinch.

“Thanks for keeping her safe.”

"You already _said_ that. It wasn’t even that safe.”

“As safe as you could, Blue,” Jet says, Jet _knows_.

The sky is orange now, when it was yellow just a while ago, and Jet can’t remember when the shift happened.

“Blue is still not my name.”

Jet snorts, and Blue’s lip quirks, because that’s what he was trying to do. That’s where they are now, Jet marvels; exhausted and injured and starving, but Smellerbee is sleeping in Longshot’s arms, Jet is in Blue’s blind spot, and Blue wants to make Jet laugh.

It hits him, that deep desperate fondness that he always gets at some point, if the kid is around long enough. Jet wants, more than anything else for this moment to last forever, where everyone's safe, and close. Or as long as they can make it, at least. He wants Blue to stay.

“Have you thought of another name, then?”

Blue crumbles into himself without moving a muscle. “No. I don’t. I don’t want who I am to be a lie.”

And maybe it’s just because of the hive, because of what happened to Jet in it, but he’s sure suddenly that he has the answer for this, that he can fix this. And yes. He can give this thing, this thing he already gave up so long ago to help Blue hold the pieces together. That's what being a leader is. Sacrifice.

“What if I gave you a name? As a gift. Then it wouldn’t be a lie. A real name, with history.”

Now Blue’s eyes are on him, wary. “I don’t… understand.”

“You could use Shi.”

That makes Blue frown. “The little guy. Who. Wasn't there, earlier.”

Jet barks a laugh at his dubious tone, but Blue keeps frowning. Jet shrugs, like it isn’t that big of a deal. It _is_ , but Blue doesn’t need to worry about that. “He was never there. It was the dark, it got into my head. That name was mine, once.”

And that has Blue turning towards him, looking him straight on, startled, and more open than Jet was certain he would ever manage to see. Young.

It makes him grin. It makes him _sure._  “What, you really think my parents named me _Jet_?”

And then he turns around, shoulders back and head high, a _leader_ , and walks into his own dying shadow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *consumption of a human corpse by an animal
> 
> * brief description of a human corpse
> 
> *Sensory deprivation
> 
> *Hallucinations, anxiety, and strange thoughts, caused by prolonged sensory deprivation


End file.
